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Chaju. Copyright No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ANCIENT INDIA. 






LANGUAGE AND RELIGIONS 



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PROF. H. OLDENBERG 




CHICAGO 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

(LONDON: 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., E. C.) 
189a 



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Translations of the articles "Religion of the Veda" and 
"Buddhism" copyrighted by The Open Court Publishing Com- 
pany, 1896. ,^ ,^ ,. 



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TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Study of Sanskrit> i 

The Religion of the Veda 43 

Buddhism 78 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



THE THREE essays forming this little volume originally 
appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau of Berlin and are 
now published in English by virtue of a special arrangement 
with their distinguished author. The first was translated by Prof. 
A. H. Gunlogsen of Tacoma, Washington, and the second and 
third by Dr. Otto W. Weyer of Eimira, N. Y. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 



THE study of Sanskrit, the science of the antiqui- 
ties of India, is about a century 0I4. It was in 
the year 1784 that a number of men acting in Calcutta 
as judges or administrative officers of the East India 
Company, formed themselves into a scientific society, 
the Asiatic Society. We may say that the founding 
of the Asiatic Society was contemporaneous with the 
rise of a new branch of historical inquiry, the possi- 
bility of which preceding generations had barely or 
never thought of. 

Englishmen began the work ; soon it was taken up 
by other nations ; and in the course of time, in a 
much greater degree than is the case with the study 
of hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, it has be- 
come ever more distinctly a branch of inquiry pecu- 
liarly German. 

The little band of workers who are busy in the 
workshops of this department of science, have not 
been accustomed to have the eyes of other men turned 
upon their doings — their successes and failures. But, 
in spite, nay, rather in consequence of this, it is right 
that an attempt should be made to invite even the 
most disinterested to an inspection of these places of 
industry, and to point out, piece by piece, the work, 
or at least part of the work, that has been done 
there. 



2 ANCIENT INDIA. 

There still lies formless in the workshops of this 
department of inquiry many a block of unhewn stone, 
which perhaps will forever resist the shaping hand. 
But still, under the active chisel, many a form has be- 
come visible, from whose features distant times and 
the past life of a strange people look down upon us — 
a people who are related to us, yet whose ways are so 
far removed in every respect from our ways. 

We shall first cast a glance at the beginning of In- 
dian research toward the close of the last century. 
We shall trace the way in which the new science, after 
the first hasty survey of its territory, at once concen- 
trated its efforts to a more profound investigation of 
its subject and advanced to an incomparably broader 
plane of study. We shall, above all, follow the diffi- 
cult course pursued in the study of the Veda, the most 
important of the literary remains of ancient India, a 
production with which even the works of the oldest 
Buddhism are not to be compared in point of histor- 
ical importance. Of the problems that this science 
encountered, its aspirations, and of the successes that 
attended its efforts in solving difficult questions, we 
may venture to give a description, or at least an 
outline. 

T. 

The first effective impulse to the study of Sanskrit 
and Sanskrit literature was given by Sir William Jones, 
who, in 1783, embarked for India to assume the post 
of Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort 
William. The honor of having inaugurated a new 
era of philological inquiry, was heightened, by the lus- 
tre and charm of personal character which this gifted 
and versatile man exerted upon his contempora- 
ries. In prose and in verse Jones is extolled by his 



The study of Sanskrit. 3 

friends of both sexes as the phoenix of his time, " the 
most enHf^htened of the sons of men " — encomiums 
many of which a calmer and more distant observer 
would be inclined to modify. The correspondence 
and other memoranda of Jones, which exist in great 
abundance,* furnish the reader of to-day rather the 
picture of an indefatigable and euphuistic dilettante, 
than that of an earnest investigator, — apart from the 
fact that he was alike greatly deficient in discernment 
and zeal. 

As a young man we find Jones engaged in reading 
and reproducing in English verse, the works of Per- 
sian and Arabian poets; occasionally also with glimpses 
into Chinese literature. Then, again, a project of his 
own, an heroic epic — a sort of new ^neid, for which, 
and certainly with ingenuity enough, the Phoenician 
mythological deities were impressed into service — 
was to celebrate the perfections of the English con- 
stitution. On the journey to India this man of thirty- 
seven sketched a catalogue of the works, which, God 
granting him life, he hoped to write after celebrated 
models. These models were carefully designated op- 
posite the separate projects of the outline. By the 
side of this heroic epic (after the pattern of Homer), 
we find a history of the war with America (after the 
patterns of Thucydides and Polybius), a philosophical 
and historical dialogue (after the pattern of Plato), 
and other plans of similar works. 

With this feeling of omnipotent self-assurance, 
wholly untroubled with doubts, Jones was placed in 
India before the task of opening a way into the gigan- 

* Edited by his biographer, Lord Teignmouth, and often given with more 
completeness than appears advisable considering the panegyrical charac- 
ter of the biography. 



4 ANCIENT INDIA. 

tic masses of an unknown literature, of a strange and 
beautiful poetry. He was as well qualified for the pur- 
pose (perhaps in a higher degree so) as many a more 
earnest and gifted scholar might have been. 

The situation of affairs which he found in India 
forced it upon the European rulers of the land as a 
duty, to acquaint themselves with the Sanskrit lan- 
guage and its literature. The rapid extension and at 
the same time the redoubled activity of the English 
rule made it inconceivable that the existence of the 
old indigenous civilization and literature of the na- 
tion could long remain ignored or merely superfici- 
ally recognized. 

Preeminently did this necessity assert itself in the 
administration of justice, where the policy of the East 
India Company imperatively demanded that the na- 
tives should be suffered to retain as many of their 
laws and customs as it was possible to concede them. 
Already, in an act of parliament passed in 1772 in re- 
gard to the affairs of the company, a measure had 
been incorporated, at the suggestion of Warren Hast- 
ings, providing that Mohammedan and Indian lawyers 
should take part in court proceedings, in order to give 
effect to native laws and assist in the formulation of 
judgments. The dependence that thus resulted, of 
European judges upon the reliability or unreliability 
of Indian pandits, must have been trying indeed, to the 
conscientious jurist; for the assertions of Indian coun- 
cillors as to the principles of the Law of inheritance, 
contract, etc., contained in the native books, were sub- 
ject to no control. 

Warren Hastings, in order to obviate the difficulty, 
had a digest made by several Brahmanical juris- 
consults from the old Sanskrit law books, and this was 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 5 

translated into English. The undertaking had but little 
success, principally because no European was to be 
found who could translate directly from the Sanskrit. 
A translation had first to be made from Sanskrit into 
Persian and from Persian again into English.* The 
necessity therefore of gaining direct access to the 
Sanskrit language was unquestionable. The under- 
taking was not an easy one, though it was still quite 
different from such apparently impossible feats of 
philological ingenuity as the deciphering of hiero- 
glyphic and cuneiform inscriptions. 

The knowledge and likewise the use of Sanskrit in 
India had lived on in unbroken tradition.f There were 
countless pandits who knew Sanskrit as well as the 
scholars of the Middle Ages knew Latin, and who 
were eminently competent to teach the language. It 
was easy to overcome the opposing Brahmanical pre- 
judices. To become master, however, of the obstacles 
which emanated from the indescribably intricate and 
perverted grammatical systemj of the Hindus, offered 
greater difficulties, which could only be overcome by 
patience and enthusiasm. 

Just at the first moments of this trouble came the 
arrival of Sir William Jones in India. Immediately 
he was the central figure. From him came the found- 
ing of the Asiatic Society; from him, the impulse to a 
new revision of the Hindu law of contract and inheri- 



* Published in 1776, under the title, "A Code of Gentoo Law." 
tThis is the case at the present time. Compare, upon this point. Max 
Miiller's " India what can it teach us " p. 78 et seq. 

^:The original complaint of Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, a missionary in 
India about the time of Jones, is well known.— "The devil, with a phenomenal 
display of ingenuity and craft, had incited the Brahmanical sages to invent a 
language so rich and so complex, that its mysteries might be concealed not 
only from the people at large, but even from the very scholars who were 
conversant with it." 



6 ANCIENT INDIA. 

tance, this time undertaken on a surer basis. He as- 
sembled about him competent Brahmans versed in 
Sanskrit. In the year 1790 he wrote: "Every day I 
talk Sanskrit with the pandits; I hope before I leave 
India to understand it as I understand Latin." 

It was not now a question of research, but of ac- 
quisition, of study; that clear and satisfactory results 
might rapidly be acquired, and that a proper selection 
of noteworthy productions of the Hindu mind might 
be made and presented before the eyes of all. Jones 
translated the most delightful of all Hindu dramas, 
the story of the touching fate of the ascetic maiden, 
Sakuntala, who in the sylvan quiet of her retreat was 
seen and loved by the kingly hunter Dushjanta— a 
work, full of the most delicate sentiment, exhaling 
fragrance like the summer splendor of Indian Nature, 
and sung in the delicate rhythms of Kalidasa, of in- 
spired eloquence.* 

Still more important than the version of Sakuntala 
was the publication of a second great work, which 
Jones translated, the Laws of Manit. It seemed as 
though a Lycurgus of a primitive oriental era had 
come to light; for this wonderful picture of a strange 
people's life was ascribed to the remotest antiquity — a 
description of Braiimanical rule by the grace of Brah- 
ma, magnified and distorted by priestly pride, in which 
the people are nothing, the prince is little, the priest is 
everything. In the face of such an abruptly accumu- 
lated mass of unexpected revelations, respecting an an- 



* It was formerly thought, for reasons that have not withstood the assault 
of criticism, that Kalidasa flourished in the first century before Christ; it was 
the custom to compare him to the Roman poets of the Augustan era, whose 
contemporaries he in that event would about have been. In point of fact he 
must be assigned to an era several centuries later,— about the sixth century 
after Christ. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 7 

cient civilization hitherto removed from all knowledge, 
how could one resist an attempt to give to that civili- 
zation and its language a place among known civili- 
zations and languages? Wherever the eye turned 
weighty and pregnant suggestions offered themselves, 
and with them the temptation to let fancy stray in 
aimless sallies. What is more, Jones was in no wise 
the man to resist such a temptation. The vocabulary 
and the grammatical structure of Sanskrit convinced 
him that the ancient language of the Hindus was re- 
lated to those of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans, 
that it must have been derived with them from a com- 
mon mother tongue. "^ But side by side with the con- 
ception of this incomparably suggestive idea, innumer- 
able fanciful theories abound in the works of Jones, 
concerning the relationship of the primitive peoples, 
where everything was found to be in some way related 
to everything else. Now the Hindu tongue was iden- 
tified with that of the Old Testament; now Hindu civ- 
ilization was brought into connection with South 
American civilization. Buddha was said to be Woden; 
and the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt were claimed 
to shov/ the style of the same workmen who built the 
Hindu cave-temples and chiseled the ancient images 
of Buddha. 

Fortunately for the new study of Sanskrit, the con- 
tinuation of the Vv^ork begun b}^ Jones fell to one of the 
most cautious and comprehensive observers of facts 
that have ever devoted their attention and talent to 



*The identity of Hindu words with those of Latin, Greek, and other lan- 
guages had been noticed by several before Jones, and likewise the correct ex- 
planation of this phenomenon, namely the kinship of the Hindu nation with 
the Latins and Greeks, had been declared by Father Pons as early as 1740. 
For fuller account, see Benfey, "History of the Science of Language," {Ge- 
schichte der Sprachwissenscha/t) pp. 222, 333-341. 



8 ANCIENT INDIA. 

the study of oriental literatures. This was Henry 
Thomas Colebrooke (born 1765; went to India 1782), 
the most active in the active band of Indian adminis- 
trative officers. He officiated now as an officer of the 
government, now again as a justice, then as diplo- 
matist — a man well versed in Indian agriculture and 
Indian trade. One can scarcely regard without as- 
tonishment the multitude of disclosures which, during 
the long period he devoted to Sanskrit, he was able 
to make from his incomparable collection of manu- 
scripts. These to-day are among the principle treas- 
ures of the India Office Library. From the province 
of Indian poetry, Colebrooke, who well knew the lim- 
its of his own power, kept aloof. But in the literature 
of law, grammar, philosophy, and astronomy, he had 
a wide reading, which in scope may never again be 
reached. He it was who made the first comprehen- 
sive disclosure in regard to the literature of the Veda. 

Colebrooke's investigations are poor in hypotheses; 
we may say he withheld too much from seeking to com- 
prehend the historical genesis of the subjects with 
which he dealt. But he established the actual foun- 
dation of broad provinces of Hindu research ; filled 
with wonder himself at the ever widening vistas of 
that literature Vv^hich v^ere now revealed to him, and 
awakening our just wonder by the sure and patient 
toil with which he sought to penetrate into those dis- 
tant parts. 

While Colebrooke was at the height of his activity, 
interest in Hindu inquiry began to be awakened in 
a country which has done more than any other land 
to make of Hindu research a firm and well-established 
science — in Germany. 

For the discoveries of Jones and Colebrooke there 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 9 

could have been no more receptive soil than the Ger- 
many of that time, full of spirited interest in the old 
national poetry of all nations and occupied with the 
stirring movements rife in its own philosophy and Ht- 
erature. Apparently, indeed, the latter were closely al- 
lied to the spirit of the distant Hindu literature; for 
here too oriental romanticism and poetical thought 
sought no less boldly than the absolute philosophy of 
Germany, to penetrate to the primal and formless 
source of all forms. From the beginning, poets stood 
in the foremost ranks among the Sanskritists of Ger- 
many j there were the two Schlegels and Friedrich 
Riickert, and beside these, careful and unassuming, 
the great founder of grammatical science, Franz Bopp. 
In the year 1808 appeared Friedrich Schlegel's 
work, Ueber die Sprache und VVeisheit der Inder (The 
Language and Learning of the Hindus). From what 
was known to him of Hindu poetry and speculation, 
and according to his own ideas of the laws and aims 
of the human mind, Schlegel, with warm and fanciful 
eloquence, drew a picture of India as a land of exalted 
primitive wisdom. Hindu reHgion and Hindu poetry 
he described as replete with exuberant power and 
Hght, in comparison with which even the noblest phi- 
losophy and poetry of Greece was but a feeble spark 
The time from which the masterpieces of the Hindus 
dated, appeared to him a distant, gigantic, primeval 
age of spiritual culture. There was the home of those 
earnest teachings, full of gloomy tragedy, of the soul's 
migration, and of the dark fate which ordains for all 
beings their ways and their end: 

Obedient to this purpose set, they wander; from God to plants; 

Here, in the abhorred world of existence, that evermoves to destruction. 

While Schlegel gave to the world this fanciful 



lo ANCIENT INDIA. 

picture of Hindu wisdom, highly effective from its 
prophetic perspectives, but still wanting in sober 
truth, Bopp applied himself, more unassumingly, but 
with an incomparably deeper grasp and patient 
sagacity, to investigating the grammatical structure 
of Sanskrit; and, on the recognized fact of the rela- 
tionship of this language with the Persian and the 
principal European tongues, to establishing the science 
of comparative grammar. In the year 1816 appeared 
his Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Ver- 
gleichung 7nit jenem der griechische7i, lateinischen, per- 
sischen, und germanischen Sprache (Conjugational Sys- 
tem of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with that 
of the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Teutonic Lan- 
guages). 

This was no longer merely an attempt to find iso- 
lated similarities in the sounds of the v/ords of related 
languages, but an attempt to trace back not only 
uniformities but also differences to their fixed laws; 
and thus in the life and growth of these languages, as 
they sprang from a common root and evolved them- 
selves into a rich complexity, to discover more and 
more the traces of a necessity dominated by definite 
principles. 

We can here only briefly touch upon the investi- 
gations made durfng the last seventy years, for which 
Bopp laid the foundation by the publication of his 
work. Rarely have such astonishing results been 
achieved by science as here. Elucidative of the early 
history of the languages of Homer and the old Italian 
monuments before they acquired the form in which 
we now find them written, the most unexpected wit- 
nesses were brought to give testimony; namely, the 
languages of the Hindus, the Germans, the Slavs, 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. n 

and the Celts. Of these related tongues, the one sheds 
light upon the obscure features of the others, just as 
natural history explains the stunted organs of some 
animals by pointing out the same organs in their orig- 
inal, perfect form, in other animals. 

The picture of the mother tongue, whose fiHal de- 
scendants are the languages of our linguistic family, 
was no longer seen in merely vague or doubtful fea- 
tures. The laws under whose dominion the system of 
sounds and forms in the separate derived languages 
have been developed from the mother tongue, are be- 
ing ascertained ever more fully and formulated ever 
more sharply. 

From the very beginning the essential instrument, 
yes, the very founciation of this investigation, was the 
Sanskrit language. In the beginning, faith in the 
primitiveness of Sanskrit in comparison with the rela- 
ted languages was too strong. During the last few 
years, however, this erroneous conception has been 
fully rectified; and this in itself is a decided step in 
advance. We know now that the apparently simpler 
and clearer state of Sanskrit in sounds and forms is in 
many respects less primitive than the complicated re- 
lations of other languages, e. g., the Greek; and that 
we must often set out from these languages rather 
than from the Sanskrit, in order to make possible the 
explanation of Sanskrit forms. Thus Sanskrit now 
receives back the light which it has furnished for the 
historical understanding of the European languages.* 

* It may be permissible here to illustrate this reversion of methods in a sin- 
gle point that has become of especially great importance to grammar. 
The Greek has five short vowels, «, e, o, i, u. The Sanskrit has i and u corres- 
ponding to z and u; but to the three sounds, a, e, o corresponds in Sanskrit only 
a single vowel a. Thus, for example, the Greek aj>o (English, /roi7z) reads in 
Sanskrit aj>a; the a of the first syllable, and the o of the second syllable of the 



12 ANCIENT INDIA. 

I must not attempt to follow in detail the course 
which the science of comparative grammar, apart 
from its connection V\^ith Hindu research, has taken. 
While the tv/o branches of the study were rapidly ad- 
vanced by Germans particularly, and likewise in France 
by the sagacious Burnouf, nev/ material kept pouring 
in from India no less rapidly. In two countries on 
the outskirts of Indian civilization, in the Himalayan 
valleys of Nepal, and in Ceylon, the sacred literature 
of the Buddhists, which had disappeared in India 
proper, was brought to light in two collections, one in 
Sanskrit and one in the popular dialect Pali. The in- ' 
genuity of Prinseps succeeded in deciphering the 
oldest Indian written characters on inscriptions and 
coins. In Calcutta was undertaken and completed in 
the Thirties the publication of the Mahabharata, a gi- 
gantic heroic poem of almost a hundred thousand 

Greek word is thus represented in Sanskrit by a. Or, to use another example, 
the Greek menos (English, courage) is in Sanskrit inanas; Greek epheron (I 
carried) — abharam. What now is the original, i. e,. what existed in the Indo- 
Germanic mother tongue for the three sounds of the Greek «, e, o, or the single 
sound of the Sanskrit a? When scholars began to study comparative philology 
upon the basis of the Sanskrit they thought the a;— and this was a conclusion 
apparently supported by the simplicity of the language— to be alone the orig- 
inal sound; and were led to believe that this vowel was later divided on Euro- 
pean soil into three sounds, a, e, o. Investigations of the most recent time — 
and for these we are to thank Amelung, Burgman, John Schmidt, and others — 
have shown that the development of the vowel system took the opposite course. 
The vowels a, e, oweve already in the Indo-Germanic mother tongue; and in 
Sanskrit, or more accurately, before the time of Sanskrit, in the language which 
the ancestors of the Indians and Persians spoke when both formed one people, 
these vowels were merged into a single vowel Thus the e of esiz and the o of 
aJ>o are more original than the a of as;(z, apa. 

Now, we find in Sanskrit that where the Greek e corresponds to the San- 
skrit «, certain consonants preceding this vowel, as. e.g., k, are affected in a 
different way by the latter, than in instances where for the a of Sanskrit the 
Greek a ov o'ls used. From the linguistic form of Sanskrit alone, which in the 
one case as in the other has a, it would not be intelligible why the k should 
each time meet a different fate. The Greek, in that it has preserved the orig- 
inal differences of the vowels, gives the key to an understanding of the peculiar 
transformations which have taken place in the /^-sound in large and importaiitt 
groups of Sanskrit words. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 13 

couplets, in whose vast cantos with their labyrinth of 
episodes and sub-episodes many generations of poets 
have brought together legends of the heroes and days 
of the olden time, of their struggles and flagellations. 

The sum and substance of all this newly-acquired 
knowledge has been incorporated in the great work of 
a Norwegian, who became, in Germany, a German — in 
the Indische Alterthumskunde (Hindu Antiquities) oi 
Christian Lassen. 

Lassen did not belong to the great pioneers of 
science, like Bopp. It must also be said that often 
that sagacity of philological thought is wanting in him, 
which sheds light on questions even where it affords 
no definite solution of them. And, indeed, was it not 
a herculean undertaking, a work like that of the Dana- 
ides, to explore the older periods of the Hindu past 
when, as the chief sources of information, one was 
solely limited to the great epic, and the law book of 
Manu? Even a surer critical power than Lassen pos- 
sessed could not have discovered much of history in 
the nebulous confusion of legends, in the invented se- 
ries of kings in Mahabhm-ata, and in that colorless uni- 
formity which the style of the Hindu Virgils spreads 
unchangeably over the enormous periods of time of 
which they assume to inform us. In spite of this, Las- 
sen's Antiquities — the work of tireless diligence and 
rare learning — stands as a landmark in the history 
of Hindu investigations, uniting all the results of past 
time, and pointing out anew, by the very things in 
which it is lacking, still untried undertakings. 

Just at this time, however, when the first volume 
of Lassen's work, treating of the earliest periods, ap- 
peared, came the beginning of a movement which has 
severed the development of Hindu studies into two 



14 ANCIENT INDIA. 

parts. New personalities appeared upon the scene 
and pushed to the front a new series of problems, for 
the solution of which an apparently inexhaustible, and 
to this day, in a certain sense, a still inexhaustible 
supply of freshly acquired material was offered. This 
was the most important acquisition that has ever been 
added to our knowledge of the world's literature 
through any one branch of oriental inquiry — the ac- 
quisition of the Veda for science. 

II. 

Considering the circumstances, this acquisition 
of the Veda for science can hardly be accounted a 
discovery. The existence and position in Hindu lit- 
erature of this great work, had long been known. At 
every step the writings that had previously been 
brought to light, pointed to the Veda as the source from 
which all proceeded — even more strikingly than in the 
literature of Greece, we are led back, at every turn, to 
the poems of Homer. Manuscripts of the Vedic texts, 
moreover, were to be found, not only in India; they 
had long been possessed in great numbers by the 
libraries of Europe. But an attempt had scarcely, if 
at all, been made to lay hold of these and see if in the 
unmeasurable chaos of this mass of writings a firm 
ground for science could not be acquired. 

The Sanskrit of the great epic poems, or of Kalidasa, 
was understood well enough ; but of the dialect in 
which the most important parts of the Veda were 
written, no more was known than one familiar with 
the French of to-day would know of the language of 
the Troubadours. Without going deeply into the study 
it was easy to discern its inherent difficulties from the 
unwonted singularity of the text and its strange con- 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 15 

tents, which, in part at least, were extremely compli- 
cated, and often involved in a maze of minor details. 
Would an earnest explorer of this territory, even in 
case he succeeded, be rewarded for his pains? 

It was a band of young German scholars who bent 
their energies to this work. Most of them are, or 
were till very lately, among us — Max Miiller, Roth, 
and Weber. Two others, whose names should not be 
omitted here, Adalbert Kuhn and Benfey, died some 
years ago. There was no need of undertaking great 
expeditions, such as were those that set out for the 
investigation of Egyptian and Babylonian antiquity. 
Those monuments in whose colossal and strange forms 
fragments of a primeval age meet the eye, were want- 
ing in India. Th^ knowledge which was to be ac- 
quired was not contained in inscriptions, but in man- 
uscripts.* Our scholars repaired to London for a 
greater or less length of time, and the work was begun 
among the store of manuscripts possessed by the East 
India House. 

There was no lack of confidence. *' It would be a 
disgrace," wrote Roth, "to the criticism and the in- 
genuity of our century which has deciphered the 
stone inscriptions of the Persian kings and the books 
of Zoroaster, if it did not succeed in reading in this 
enormous literature the intellectual history of the 
Hindu nation." 

Much that Roth expected has been accomplished 
or is on the way towards accomplishment. Of much 
that was hoped for at that time, we can now say that 
it was unattainable, and understand why. What has 



* The royal library at Berlin also acquired and owns a rich collection of 
Sanskrit manuscripts, for which a foundation was laid by the purchase, at 
the command of Frederick William IV., of the Chambers ''manuscri'pts. 



i5 ANCIENT INDIA. 

been attained, however, has given to the picture, which 
science formed of Hindu antiquity, an entirely different 
aspect. Unbounded in extent, this picture formerly 
seemed to lose itself in the nebulous depths of an im- 
measurable past. Now, determinate limits have been 
found, and the remotest initial point has been discov- 
ered for verifiable history. Authentic sources were 
disclosed, leading to the earliest age of Hindu civiliza- 
tion, from which, and regarding which, historical 
testimony in the usual sense of the word became ac- 
cessible ; and instead of the twilight, peopled v/ith 
uncertain, shadowy giants, in which the epic poems 
made those times appear, the Veda opened to us a 
reality which we may hope to understand. Or, if in 
many instances, instead of the hoped for forms, it has 
afforded the eye but an empty space, even this was a 
step in advance. For then it was at least shown that 
the knowledge which was sought was not to be had ; 
and that which had been given as such, had disclosed 
itself as an imaginative picture born of the caprice of 
a later legend-maker. 

The literature of epic poetry, apparently, could no 
longer lay claim to an incalculable antiquity ; it sank 
back into a sort of Middle Ages, behind which the newly 
discovered, real antiquity loomed forth, studding the 
horizon of historical knowledge with significant forms. 
We shall now see how the task of understanding the 
Veda was accomplished, and shall describe at the same 
time what it was that had thus been acquired. We 
have here a newly disclosed literature of venerable an- 
tiquity, rich in marks of earnest effort, logically devel- 
oped in sharply, nay rigidly, characterized forms ; we 
have a nev/ly discovered piece of history, forming the 
historical — or shall we say unhistorical?— -beginnings 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 17 

of a people related to us by race, who at an early day 
set out in paths distinctly removed from the ways of 
all other peoples, and created their own strange forms 
of existence, bearing in them the germs of the mis- 
fortunes they have suffered. 

By what means did we succeed in understanding 
the Veda? 

Almost all the more important parts of the Vedic 
literature— for the Veda, like the Bible, is not a sep- 
arate text, but a literature with wide ramifications — 
are preserved in numerous, and, for the most part, 
relatively modern manuscripts. Only rarely are they 
older than a few centuries; since in the destructive 
climate of India it could not be otherwise. The texts, 
however, of these later manuscripts descend from re- 
mote antiquity. 

Before they came to be written in the present 
manuscripts, or written in manuscript - form at all, 
they encountered, in the course of great periods of 
time, many and manifold misfortunes. It is the task 
of the philological inquirer to ascertain the character 
of these events — to determine the genetic history of 
the texts. It may be said that these texts in the 
shape they have been transmitted to us, resemble 
paintings by old masters, which bear unmistakable 
traces of alternate injuries and attempted restorations 
by competent and incompetent hands. What we 
want to know, so far as it lies in our power, is the 
form and general character in which they originally 
existed. 

The period to which the origin of the old Vedic 
poems belongs, we cannot assign in years, nor yet in 
centuries. But we know that these poems existed, 
when there was not a city in India, but only hamlets 



i8 ANCIENT INDIA. 

and castles j when the names of the powerful tribes 
which at a later time assumed the first rank among 
the nations of India were not even mentioned, no more 
so than in the Germany which Tacitus described were 
mentioned the names of Franks and Bavarians. It 
was the period of migrations, of endless, turbulent 
feuds among small unsettled tribes with their nobles 
and priests; people fought for pastures, and cows, and 
arable land. It was the period of conflict between the 
fair-skinned immigrants, who called themselves Arya, 
and the natives, the ^'dark people," the "unbelievers 
that propitate not the Gods." 

As yet the thought and belief of the Hindus did 
not seek the divine in those formless depths in which 
later ages conceived the idea of the eternal and hidden 
Brahma. Wherever in nature the brightest pictures 
met the eye and the mightiest tones struck the ear, 
there were their Gods — the luminous arch of heaven, 
the red hues of dawn, the thundering storm-god and 
his followers, the winds. The Vedic Aryans had not 
yet reached their later abode on the two powerful sis- 
ter streams, the Ganges and the Yumna; the Sindhu 
(Indus) was still for them the " Mother Stream," of 
which one of the oldest poets of the Rig Veda says : * 

" From earth along the reach of Heaven riseth the sound ; 
Ceaseless the roar of her waters, the bright one. 

As floods of thundering rain, poured from the darkened cloud-bosom, 
So rushes the Sindu, like the steer, the bellowing one." 

The poetry of the Rig Veda dates from the time of 
those wanderings and struggles that took place on 
the Indus and its tributary streams. Certain fam- 
ilies exercised the functions of priestly offices, and 

* Hundreds of Vedic melodies have been handed down to us in a form the 
interpretation of which can be subject to no real doubt. As it appears, they 
are the oldest but unfortunately the poorest memorials of musical antiquity. 



THE STUD V OF SANSKRIT. ig 

possessed the acquisitions of an artificially connected 
speech together with a simple form of chant using but 
few tones. These families created Vedic poetry, and 
transmitted the art to their posterity. The songs of 
the Rig Veda, which are almost all sacrificial songs, were 
not really what we call popular poetry. We do not 
hear in them the language that pours forth from the soul 
of a nation, as it communes in poetical rhythm with 
itself. It was a poetry that wanted mainly the proper 
hearers — the masses of the people who spoke through 
the mouth of the poet. Their hearers were God Agni, 
God Indra, or Goddess Dawn ; and the poet was not 
he whom the passionate impulses of his own soul or 
his own love of song and legend impelled to sing, but 
he was mainly one who belonged to a poet-family — 
one of the families of men who in the course of time 
became united as a caste and erected ever more insu- 
perable barriers between their sacred existence and 
the profane reality of daily life. For the gods such 
a poet only " could frame a worthy poem, as an expe- 
rienced, skillful wheelwright makes a wagon," — a poem 
which would be rewarded by the rich princely lords 
of the sacrifice, with steeds and kine, with golden or- 
naments and female slaves from the spoils of war, 
'^Thy blessing," says a Vedic poet to a God,"" 

" Rests with the givers, 
With the victors, the many valiant heroes, 
Who make gifts to us of clothing, kine, and horses ; 
May they rejoice in the splendor and plenty of divine bounty. 

Let all things waste that they have won 

Who, without rewarding, would profit by our hymns to heaven. 

The godless ones, that boast their fortune. 

The transgressors— cast them from the light of day." 

It has been fatal for all thought and poetry in In- 
dia, that a second world, filled with strangely fantastic 

*Rig Veda v. 42, 8-9. 



20 ANCIENT INDIA. 

shapes, was established at an early day beside the 
real world. This was the place of sacrifice with its 
three sacred fires and the schools in which the virtu- 
osos of the sacrificial art were educated — a sphere of 
strangest activity and the playground of a subtle, 
empty mummery, whose enervating power over the 
spirit of an entire nation we can scarcely comprehend 
in its full extent. The poetry of the Rig Veda shows 
us this process of disease at an early stage ; but it is 
there, and much of that which constitutes the essence 
of the Rig Veda, is rooted in it. 

In the foreground stands the sacrifice, and through- 
out, only the sacrifice. " By sacrifice the Gods made 
sacrifice ; these regulations were the first," it is said in 
a verse which is thrice repeated in the Rig Veda. The 
praise of the God for whom the sacrificial offerings 
were intended, his power, his victories, and the prayers 
for possessions which were hoped for in return for hu- 
man offerings — the prosperity of flocks and posterity, 
long life, destruction of enemies, the hated and the 
godless — such is the subject-matter of the multitudi- 
nous repetitions that recur throughout the hymns of 
the Rig Veda. Still, among these verse-making sacri- 
ficers there was not an utter absence of real poets. 
And thus among^ the stereotyped implorations and 
songs of praise we find here and there a great and 
beautiful picture — the wonder of the poet's soul at the 
bright marvels of nature or the deep expression of an 
earnest inner life. A poet from the priestly family of 
the Bharadvajas sings of the goddess Ushas, the 
dawn:* 

*The Indian word Ushas is related to the Greek Eos, the Latin Aurora. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 



" We see thee, thou lovely one ; faf , far, thou shinest. 
To heaven's heights thy brilliant light-beams dart. 
In beauteous splendor shimmering, unveilest thou thy bosom, 
Radiant v/ith heaven's sheen, celestial queen of dawn I 

" The red bulls draw their chariot. 
Where in thy splendor thou o'erspread'st the heavens ; 
Thou drivest av/ay night ; as a hero, a bow-man, 
As a swift charioteer frighteneth his enemies. 

" A beautiful path has been made for thee in the mountain. 
Thou unconquerable one, thou risest from out the waters. 
So bring thou us treasures to revive us on 
Our further course, queenly daughter of heaven."* 

Another poet sings of Parjanya, the rain God: f 

" Like the driver who forward whips his steeds. 
So he urges onward his messengers, the clouds. 
From afar the thunder-tone of the lion arises 
When the God makes rain pour from the clouds. 

" Parjanya's lightnirtgs dart ; the winds blow ; 
The floods pour from heaven ; up spring grass and plants. 
To all that lives and moves a quickening is imparted, 
When the God scatters his seeds on the earth. 

" At his command the earth bows deeply down ; 
At his command hoofed creatures come to life ; 
At his command bloom forth the bright flowers : 
May Parjanya grant us strong defence ! 

" A flood of rain hast thou sent ; now cease ; 
Thou didst make penetrable the desert wastes. 
For us thou hast caused plants to grow for food, 
And the prayer of men thou hast fulfilled." 

But we must turn from the description of Vedic 
poetry to examine the fortune that this production 
encountered on its way from distant antiquity to the 
present time, from the sacrificial places on the Indus 
to the workshops of the EngHsh and German philolo- 
gists. Here a conspicious fact is to be dwelt upon, 

* Rig Veda VI. 64. The hymn following is V. 83. 

t This God also reappears among the kindred peoples of Europe, as Fior- 
gynn in the northern mythology, and among the Lithuanians and Prussians as 
the God Perkunas, of whom an old chronicle says : " Perkunas was the third 
idol; and him the people besought for storms, so that during his time they had 
rain and fair weather and suffered not from the thunder and the lightning." 



22 ANCIENT INDIA. 

which belongs to the strangest phenomena of Indian 
history, so rich in strange events. The hymns of the 
Rig Veda, as well as the hymns of the other Vedas, 
have been composed, collected, and transmitted to 
succeeding ages. There has been incorporated in 
them a very large sacerdotal prose literature, devel- 
oped throughout the older and later divisions, and 
treating of the art and symbolism of sacrifice. There 
have also arisen heretical sects, like the Buddhists, 
who denied the authority of the Veda, and instead of 
its teachings reverenced as a sacred text the code of 
ordinances proclaimed by Buddha. And all this has 
taken place without the art of writing. 

In the Vedic ages writing was not known. At the 
time when Buddhism arose it was indeed known — the 
Indians probably learned to write from Semites — but 
it was used only for inditing short communications in 
practical life, not for writing books. We have very 
sure and characteristic information as to the role which 
the art of writing played, or rather did not play, in the 
church life of the Buddhists at a comparatively late 
age, say about 400 B. C. The sacred text of this sect 
affords a picture, executed even in its minutest features, 
of life in the houses and parks which the brethren in- 
habited. We can^see the Buddhist monks pursue their 
daily life from morning to night ; we can see them in 
their wanderings and during their rest, in solitude and 
in intercourse with other monks, or laymen ; we know 
the equipment of the places occupied by them, their 
furniture, and the contents of their store-rooms. But 
nowhere do we hear that they read their sacred texts 
or copied them j nowhere, that in the dwellings of the 
monks such things as writing utensils or manuscripts 
were found. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 23 

The memory of the spiritual brethren, "rich in 

hearing," what we to-day call a well-read man was 

then called one rich in hearing —took the place of a 
cloister library ; and if the knowledge of some indis- 
pensable text,— as, e. g., the formula of confession 
which had to be recited at the full and new moon in 
the assembly of the brethren,— was in danger of 
being lost among a body of priests, they acted on the 
dictum laid down in an old Buddhistic ordinance: "By 
these monks a monk shall immediately be sent to a 
neighboring parish. He must be thus instructed : ' Go, 
Brother, and when thou hast learned by heart the 
formula of confession, the complete one or the abre- 
viated one, come back to us.' " 

It must be admitted that under such circumstances 
all the conditions for the existence of books, and the 
relations between books and reader — if it be allowed me 
for the sake of brevity to use these expressions— must 
have been of a very different nature than in an age of 
writing or one of printing. A book could then exist 
only on condition that a body of men existed among 
whom it was taught and learned and transmitted from 
generation to generation. A book could be known only 
at the price of learning it by heart, or of having some 
one at hand who had thus learned it. Texts of a con- 
tent which only claimed a passing notice, could not as 
a rule exist. This was fatal for historical writing and 
generally speaking for all profane literature. Above 
all, the existing texts were subjected to the disfigure- 
ments that errors of memory, carelessness, or attempts 
at improvement on the part of the transmitters must 
have imported into them. 

Under conditions such as have been described 
above, the poetry of the Rig Veda has been handed 



24 ANCIENT INDIA. 

down from generation to generation through many- 
centuries. Separate poems were brought into the col- 
lection in the course of oral compilation and trans- 
mission. The collection was re-corrected on repeated 
occasions and was brought to greater completeness; 
again only by oral compilation and transmission. It 
is conceivable enough that thus the original structure 
yes, even the existence itself of special hymns was 
often injured, effaced, or destroyed. Remodeling de- 
stroyed their form. The lines of division between 
hymns standing side by side would often be forgotten 
and numbers of them would be merged into an ap- 
parent unity. Modern, and easily intelligible terms 
drove out the obsolete phrases and the ancient word- 
forms — often the most valuable remains for the inves- 
tigator, whom they help to explain the history of the 
language, just as the scientist deduces from fossil re- 
mains the history of organic life. 

Especially fatal was it for the old and true formi of 
the Vedic hymns that they have been stretched upon 
the Procrustean bed of grammatical analysis. Earlier 
and more strongly than in any other nation of antiquity, 
was interest and pleasure taken in India in scientifically 
dissecting language. Closely examining the separate 
sounds of speech, and their underlying modifications, 
they employed exceptional ingenuity and discrimi- 
nation in constructing a system from which, when 
it became known in Europe, the science of our cen- 
tury found ample reason to learn much that was 
marvellous. The ingenuity and penetration of the 
students of Vedic literature has been burdened like 
a curse with that genuinely Hindu trait, subtlety; 
the joy — which at times seems to border on malicious- 
ness — of stretching and forcing things into an artistic 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 25 

garment, of building up labyrinths of fine points, In 
whose involved courses the skilled and cunning stu- 
dent ostentatiously thought himself able to find his 
way. Thus, in this grammatical science, understanding 
and misunderstanding of the real truth are mingled 
in inexplicable confusion. That under the hands of 
such linguistic theorists the precious wealth of the 
old Vedic hymns has not remained inviolate, is easily 
comprehended. In some cases, isolated details of 
the traditions of prior epochs were caught and clung 
to with felicitous acumen j in others, no hesitation 
was had in wiping out of existence entire domains of 
old and genuine phenomena to suit half-correct theo- 
ries, so that the most patient ingenuity of modern 
science will only be able to restore in part what has 
been lost. 

Finally, however, the caprice under which the 
hymns of the old singers must have suffered, had its 
end. The more people accustomed themselves to see in 
these poems not merely beautiful and efficacious 
prayers but a sacred revelation of the divine, the higher 
did their transmitted form — even when this is, or seems 
to be, of necessity, so irregular — rise in the respect of 
theologians, and the more careful must they have been 
to describe and preserve this form with all its dissim- 
ilarities. 

We possess a remarkable work — it is composed in 
verse like many Hindu treatises and hand-books — in 
which a grammarian, Caunaka, who must probably be 
placed about the time 400 B. C, has given a deep and 
unusually well-planned survey of the vocal peculiar- 
ities of the Rig Veda text. The study of Caunaka's 
work affords us the proof that from that time on the 
Vedic hymns, protected by the united care of gram- 



26 ANCIENT INDIA. 

matical and religious respect for letters, have suffered 
no further appreciable corruptions. The most im- 
portant manuscripts of the Rig Veda which we know, 
may be two thousand years later than this hand-book 
of Caunaka's, but they bear all tests in a remarkable 
way if we compare them with it. 

The Rig Veda, indeed, which that Hindu scholar 
found, was not unlike a ruin. And it was hardly pos- 
sible by the help of Hindu scholarship to transmit it 
to posterity in a better condition than it was received 
But still the conscientious diligence of the Hindu lin- 
guists and divines accomplished something : for the 
last two thousand years it has preserved these vener- 
able fragments from the dangers of further decay. 
They lie there, untouched, just as they were in the 
days of Caunaka. And the investigation of our day, 
which has already succeeded in bringing forth from 
many a field of ruins the living features of a by-gone 
existence, is at work among them, now with the bold 
grasp of confident divination, now in the quiet uni- 
formity of slowly advancing deliberation, to deduce 
whatever it may of the real forms of those old priestly 
poems. 



III. 



We may say, that the greatest undertakings planned 
and the most important results achieved in the field 
of Sanskrit research, are linked with the names of Ger- 
man investigators. If we add that this could not easily 
be otherwise, it is not from national vanity ; we should 
but express the actual facts of the case, based upon 
the development of the science. It was natural that 



THE STUD V OF SANSKRIT. 27 

the first movements toward the founding of Hindu re- 
search, the first attempts to grasp the vastly accumu- 
lated material and find provisional forms for it, should 
have been the work of Englishmen, men who spent a 
good part of their lives in India, and were there 
brought in constant contact with native Sanskrit 
scholars. But not less natural was it that the honor 
of instituting further progress and gaining a deeper in- 
sight should be accorded to Germans. The two fields 
of knowledge by which, especially, life and power were 
imparted to Hindu investigations were and are essen- 
tially German. These are comparative grammar, which 
we may say was founded by Bopp, and that profound 
and potent science, or perhaps more correctly ex- 
pressed art, of philology, which was practiced by 
Gottfried Hermann, and likewise by Karl Lachmann, 
a man imbued with the proud spirit of Lessing, full of 
acute and purposeful ability, exact and truthful in 
small matters as in great. Representatives of this 
philology, moved to antipathy by many characteristic 
features of the Hindu spirit, and not the least influ- 
enced by the assertion that Latin and Greek grammar 
has this or that to learn from the Sanskrit, might meet 
the new science of India with reserve or more than 
reserve. Still this could in no wise alter the truth that 
the study of Hindu texts, the investigation of Hindu 
literary remains, could be learned from no better teach- 
ers than from those masters who had succeeded in im- 
proving and interpreting the classical texts with un- 
erring certainty and excellence of method. 

It was a Leipsic disciple of Hermann and Haupt 
who, at the instigation of Burnouf, in 1845, in Paris, 
conceived the plan of publishing the Rig Veda with 
the commentary of its Hindu expounder, the abbot Sa- 



28 ANCIENT INDIA. 

yana, who flourished in the 14th century after Christ. 
This was the great work of Max Miiller, the first of 
of those fundamental undertakings on which Vedic 
philology rests. It was necessary above all to know 
how the Brahmins themselves translated the hymns 
of their forefathers, which were preserved in the Rig 
Veda, from the Vedic language into current Sanskrit, 
and how they solved the problems which the grammar 
of the Veda presented, by the means their own gram- 
matical system offers. Herein lay the indispensable 
foundation of all further investigation. It was ne- 
cessary to weigh the Hindu traditions concerning the 
explanation of the Veda, which erred in underestima- 
tion as well as overestimation, and to test the conse- 
quences of both errors, in order finally to learn the art 
of scientifically estimating them. This constitutes the 
great importance of Max Miiiler's work extending 
through a quarter of a century (i 849-1 874). To com- 
plete was easy, but to begin was exceedingly difficult; 
for most of the grammatical and theological texts 
which formed the basis for Sayana's deductions, were, 
when Max Miiller began the work, books sealed with 
seven seals. 

A few years after the first volume of Max Miiiler's 
Rig Veda appeared, two other scholars united in a 
work of still greater magnitude. It has long since be- 
come to all Sanskritists the most indispensable tool 
for their labors. I refer to the Sanskrit dictionary, 
compiled under the commission of the Academy of 
St. Petersburg, Russia, by Roth and Bohtlingk. It 
was intended to make a dictionary for a language the 
greatest and most important part of whose texts were 
still not in print. The work was similar to that 
which the Grimm Brothers began at the same time 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT, 29 

for the German language. Roth undertook the Vedic 
literature, the foundation of the whole ; Bohtlingk the 
later periods. Friendly investigators, and especially 
Weber, helped them by bringing into use the known 
and accessible texts or manuscripts that were service- 
able to them. The most important thing was, that the 
Veda had now for the first time — setting aside a few 
previous studies — to be gone through with a view to 
lexicography. The explanations which the Hindus 
themselves were wont to give of the words of the Vedic 
language were regarded as a valuable aid for under- 
standing it. But the matter did not rest here. "We 
do not hold it," said the two compilers in their preface, 
" to be our task to acquire that understanding of the 
Veda which was current in India some centuries ago j 
but we seek the sense which the poets themselves gave 
to their hymns and maxims." They undertook '*to get 
at the sense from the texts themselves, by collating 
all the passages related in word or meaning."' In this 
way they hoped to re-establish the meaning of each 
word, not as a colorless conception, but in its individu- 
ality and therefore in its strength and beauty. The 
Veda was thus to re-acquire its living sense, the full 
wealth of its expression. The thought of the earliest 
antiquity was to appear to us in new forms full of life 
and reality. 

The execution of this v/ork, carried on with tena- 
cious industry and brilliant success for four and twenty 
years (1852-1875), did not fall short of the magnitude 
of the plan originally conceived. In minor points we 
find it easy to point out numerous deficiencies and 
errors. The two compilers well knew that without 
that spirit of boldness which does not stand in fear of 
unavoidable errors, it were better never to undertake 



30 ANCIENT INDIA. 

their task. In face, however, of the great value of that 
which they have accomplished, all faults sink into in- 
significance. 

What a chasm separates their work from that of 
their predecessor, Wilson ! * In Wilson's work there is 
little more than a fair enumeration of the meanings 
which Hindu traditions assigned to the words ; for his 
dictionary the Veda scarcely exists, if it does so at all. 
Here in the work of Roth and Bohtlingk on the other 
hand, is brought to light the immense wealth, replete 
with oriental splendor, of the richest of all languages ; 
the history of each word, and likewise the fortunes 
that have befallen it in the different periods of the lit- 
erature and have determined its meaning, are brought 
before our eyes. The difference between the two great 
periods in which the development of Hindu research 
falls, could not be incorporated more clearly than in 
these two dictionaries. In the one instance are found 
the beginnings, which English science, resting imme- 
diately on the shoulders of the Indian pandits, has 
made ; in the other is the continuation of English 
work conducted by strict philological methods to a 
breadth and depth incomparably beyond those begin- 
nings, and at the head of this undertaking stand Ger- 
man scholars. 

To Miiller's great edition of the Rig Veda and to 
the St. Petersburg Dictionary further investigations 
have been added in great abundance, and these have 
more and more extended the limits of our knowledge 
of the Veda. Already a new generation of laborers 
have taken their places beside the original pioneers in 
these once so impassable regions. As a whole, or in 
its separate parts, the Rig Veda has been repeatedly 

* Wilson's dictionary appeared in 1819; a second edition in 1832. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 31 

translated. Its stock of words and inflections has been 
studied and overhauled from ever new points of view 
and with ever new questions in mind. To many a 
picturesque word of the strong, harsh Vedic language 
its full weight has thus been given back. 

The principles and practices according to which 
the old collectors and revisers of the Veda text pro- 
ceeded, are now being examined by us with a view to 
being able to determine what came into their hands 
as tradition and what they themselves imported into 
the traditions. The readings of the passages quoted 
from the Rig Veda in the other Vedas are being col- 
lected, in order to trace in them the remains of the 
genuine and oldest textual form. The religion and 
mythology of the Veda have been described ; the na- 
tional hfe of the Vedic tribes has been portrayed in 
all its phases. The texts afford the data for such a 
portraiture of these features that it has justly been 
said that the description given surpasses in clearness 
and accuracy Tacitus's account of the national life of 
the Germans.* Finally an attempt has been made — 
or rather an attempt will have to be made, for even at 
this time the work is in its beginnings — to discover 
amid the masses of Vedic prayers and sacrificial 
hymns something which must be an especially welcome 
find to scientific curiosity— the beginning of the Indian 
Epic.f 

There could be no doubt that in so poetical a 
period the pleasure of romancing produced abundant 
fruit. Short narratives, short hymns must then have 

* H. Zimmer : Altindisches Leben : die CulUir der vedischen Arier. (Ancient 
Indian Life : the Civilization of the Vedic Aryans.) Berlin, 1879, p. vii. 

t The remarks here made on the beginnings of the Indian Epic rest on 
conceptions which I have before briefly sought to establish. ZeUschrift 
der Deutschen Morgenldnd, Gesellsch,, 1885, p. 52, et seq. 



32 ANCIENT INDIA. 

existed, enclosed, as it were, in narrow frames. Thus, 
in general, are the beginnings of epic poetry shaped, 
before poetic ability rises and ventures to narrate in 
wider scope and with more complicated structure the 
fate of men and heroes. It seemed, however, as though 
those beginnings of the Indian epic were lost. But 
they were preserved, though to be sure in a peculiarly 
fragmentary form. In the Rig Veda there is many a 
medley of apparently disconnected verses in which 
we have thought to discover the accumulated sweep- 
ings of poetic workshops. In fact we have here the 
fragmentary remains of epic narratives. These verses 
were once inserted in a prose framework; the narrative 
part of the Epic being in prose, and the speeches and 
counter-speeches in verse, just as, often, in Grimm's 
fairy-tales when the poor daughter of the king or the 
powerful dwarf has to speak an especially weighty or 
touching word, a rhyme or two appears. 

Now, only the verses were memorized in their 
fixed original form by the Vedic tale-tellers. The 
prose, each new narrator would render with fresh 
words ; until finally its original subject-matter fell into 
almost total oblivion, and the verses alone survived, 
appearing sometimes as a series of dialogues suffi- 
ciently long and full of meaning to enable us to gain 
an understanding of the whole, and then again as un- 
recognizable fragments no more admitting an infer- 
ence as to their proper place and connection in the 
story of which they form a part than — to keep the 
same comparison — a couple of rhymes in one of 
Grimm's fairy-tales would enable us to restore the 
whole tale. 

It may be permitted for the sake of making clear 
what has been said, to cite here a passage from one of 



THE STUD Y OF SANSKRIT. 33 

those old narratives whose connection, at least as a 
whole, may be conjecturally determined.* The scene 
is between gods and demons, its subject is the great 
battle which was fought in heaven, the thunder fight, 
which for the strife-loving spirit of that age was the 
pattern of their own victories. Vritra, the envious 
fiend, kept the waters of the clouds in captivity, that they 
might not pour down upon the earth; but God Indra 
smote the demon with his thunderbolt and let the lib- 
erated waters flow. Indra — this must have been said 
in the lost prose introduction to the narrative — felt, as 
he entered the battle, too weak for his terrible oppo- 
nent. The gods, faint-hearted, withdrew from his 
side. Only one offered himself as an ally, Vayu (the 
wind),f the swiftest of the gods, but he demanded as a 
reward for his fidelity, part of the sacrificial draught 
of Soma, which men offer to Indra. Vayu speaks : 

" Tis I. I come to thee the foremost, as is meet ; 
Behind me march in full array, the Gods. 
Givest thou me, O Indra, but a share of sacrifice. 
And thou shalt do, with my alliance, valiant deeds of might." 

Indra accepted the alliance : 

" Of the honied draught I give thee the first portion ; 
Thine shall it be ; for thee shall be pressed the Soma. 
Thou shalt stand as friend at my right hand ; 
Then shall we slay the serried hosts of our foe." 

Then a new person appears, a human singer. We 
know not whether a definite one among the great 
saints of that early time, the prophets of the later 
generation of singers, was thought of or not. He 
wished to praise Indra ; but can Indra now be praised? 
The hostile demon is not yet conquered ; doubts as to 

* Rig Veda 8,100. I omit a few verses of obscure meaning, and say noth- 
ing of difficulties, for which this is not the place to give a solution. 

t He is also called Vata. This name has been identified— though the cor- 
rectness of this is highly questionable — with the German name Woden. 



34 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Indra and his might come to the singer. He says to 
his people : 

" A song of praise bring ye who long for a blessing, 
If truth be truth, sing ye the praise of Indra." 

" There is no Indra," then said many a one, 

" Who saw him ? Who is he whom we shall praise ?" 

Then Indra himself gives answer to the weak- 
hearted : 

•' Here stand I before thee, look hither, O Singer 
In lofty strength I tower above all beings. 
The laws of sacred order make me strong ; 
I, the smiter, smite the worlds." 

The confidence of the pious in their God is re- 
stored, his hymn of praise is sounded. And now Indra 
enters the conflict. The falcon has brought him the 
Soma, and in the intoxication of the ambrosial drink, 
the victorious one hurls his thunderbolt at the demon. 
Like a tree smitten by lightning, falls the enemy. Now 
the waters may flow forth from their prisons : 

" Now hasten forth t Scatter thyself freely I 
He who detained thee is no more. 
Deep into the side of Vitra has been hurled 
The dreaded thunderbolt of Indra. 

" Swift as thought sped the Falcon along; 
Pierced into the citadel, the brazen. 
And up to heaven, to the thunderer, 
The soaring falcon bore the Soma. 

" In the sea the thunderbolt rests. 
Deep engulfed in the watery billows. 
The flowing and ever-constant waters 
To him bring generous gifts." 

I pass over the difficult conclusion of the poem — 
the creation of language by Indra after the battle with 
Vitra. One fourth of the languages that exist on earth, 
Indra formed into clear and intelligible speech ; these 
are the languages of men. The other three fourths, 
however, have remained indistinct and incompre- 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 35 

hensiMe ; these are the languages that quadrupeds and 
birds and all insects speak. 

This is one of the early narratives of the Hindus 
concerning the deeds of their gods and heroes. We 
must not endeavor here, to restore the lost portions 
written in prose which served to connect the strophes. 
To make the modern reader clear as to the connection 
of the verses, another method of expression must be 
chosen than that pecuHar to the narrators of the Vedic 
epoch. As it appears, they were content with recount- 
ing the necessary facts, or rather with recalling them 
to their hearers, in short and scanty sentences. 

The verses set in the narrative are not wanting, 
however, in flights of poetic eloquence— as the poem 
of Indra's battle will have shown. Without the finer 
shades of human soul-life, it is true, yet in earnest 
simple greatness, Hke mountains or old gigantic trees, 
the heroic figures of these ancient sagas stand forth. 
What takes place among them is similar, nay more 
than similar, to that which takes place in nature. For 
as yet the primitive natural significance of those gods 
has hardly been veiled by the human vesture which 
they wear, and in the narratives of their deeds the 
great pictures of nature's life with its wonders and 
terrors are everywhere present. The duty of bringing 
together and interpreting such fragments of this most 
ancient Epic activity, Vedic investigators must reckon 
among their most fruitful though perhaps not their 
easiest tasks. 

IV. 

At this stage of our inquiry, the question arises, 
What do we know of the history of India in the 
age which produced the Vedas ? Where does the pos- 



36 ANCIENT INDIA. 

sibUity here begin of fixing events chronologically? 
In that part of the province of history in which this 
precision is lacking, can any determinate lines of an- 
other sort be drawn ? 

Of a history of ancient India in the sense in which 
we speak of the history of Rome, or in the manner in 
which the history of the Israelitic nation is recounted 
in the Old Testament, the Vedas afford us no testi- 
mony. A succession of events clearly united with one 
another, the presence of energetic personalities, whose 
aspirations and achievements we can understand, mo- 
mentous struggles for the institution and security of 
civil government — these are things of which nothing 
is told to us. We may add that these are things which 
seem to have existed in Ancient India less than in any 
other civilized nation. The more we know of the his- 
tory of this people the more it appears like an incohe- 
rent mass of chance occurrences. These occurrences 
are wanting in that firm bearing and significant sense 
which the power of a willing and conscious national 
purpose imparts to its doings. Only in the history of 
thought, and especially of religious thought, do we 
tread, in India, upon solid ground. Of a history in any 
other sense we can here scarcely speak. And a peo- 
ple who has no history, has of course no written his- 
torical works. 

In those eras in which, among soundly organized 
nations, interest in the past and its connection 
with the struggles and sufferings of the present 
awakes, when the Herodotuses and Fabiuses, the nar- 
rators of that which has happened, are wont to arise, 
the literary activity of India was absorbed in theolog- 
ical and philosophical speculation. In all occurrences 
was seen but one aspect, namely, that they were tran- 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 37 

sitory; and everything transitory was recognized, we 
may not say as a simile, yet as something absolutely 
worthless, an unfortunate nothing, from which the 
sage was bound to divert his thoughts. 

We can thus easily see how fully we must renounce 
our hopes of an exact result, when the question is 
raised as to the time to w^hich the little we know of the 
outer vicissitudes of the ancient Hindu tribes must 
be assigned, and, especially, as to the time in which the 
great literary remains of the Veda and the changes 
which it wrought in the Hindu world of thought be- 
long. The basis that might serve toward definitely 
answering these questions of chronology — lists of 
kings with statements of the duration of each reign — 
is wholly wanting for the Vedic period. Of early 
tim.es at least no such lists have been handed down to 
us; there are no traces indeed that such ever existed. 
The later catalogues, however, which have been fab- 
ricated in the shops of the Indian compilers, can to- 
day no more be taken into consideration as the basis 
of earnest research, than the statements of the Roman 
chroniclers as to how many years King Romulus and 
King Numa reigned. How unusual it was in the Ve- 
dic times for the Hindus to ask the "when" of events, 
is shown very clearly by the fact, that no expression was 
in current use by which any year but the present was 
distinguishable from any other year. 

The result of this for us, and likewise, of course, 
for the science of Ancient India, is that those long 
centuries were and are practically synonymous with 
immeasurable time. The standard by v/hich we are 
accustomed to compute the distance of historical ante- 
cedence in our thoughts or imaginations, fail us in this 
richly developed civilization as completely as in the 



38 ANCIENT INDIA. 

prehistoric domains of the stone age, — in the first 
feeble glimmerings of human existence. In fact, as 
prehistoric research tries to compute the duration of 
the past ages which have given to the earth's surface 
its form, so as to determine approximately the age of 
the human remains embedded in the strata of the 
earth; so, in a similar wa}^, the investigation of the 
Hindu Vedas, in its attempts to compute the age of 
the Veda, has sought refuge in the gradual changes 
that have imperceptibly taken place in the course of 
centuries, in that great time-measurer, the starry 
heavens. 

There was found in a work, classed as one of the 
Vedas, an astronomical statement which has served as 
a basis for such computations. The result attained 
was that this particular work dated from the year 1181 
B. C. (according to another reckoning 1391 B. C). 
Unfortunately, the belief that in this way certain data 
are to be acquired had to vanish quickly enough. It 
was soon found out that the Vedic statement is not 
sufficient to afford any tenable basis for astronomical 
computations. Thus it remains that for the times of 
the Vedas there is no fixed chronological date. And to 
any one who knows of what things the Hindu au- 
thors were wont. to speak, and of what not, it will be 
tolerably certain, that even the richest and most unex- 
pected discoveries of new texts, though they may 
vastly extend our knowledge in other respects, will in 
this respect make no changes whatever. 

There are two great events in the history of India 
with which this darkness begins to be dispelled — the 
one approximately, and the other accurately, referable 
to an ascertainable point of time. These are the ad- 
vent of Buddha and the contact of the Hindus with 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 39 

the Greeks under Alexander the Great and his succes- 
sors. 

That it was the old Buddhistic communities in In- 
dia that first began the work of gathering up the con- 
nected traditions within historical memory, seems 
certain. At least this corresponds with the apparent 
and accepted course of events. To Vedic and Brah- 
manical philosophy all earthly fortunes were abso- 
lutely worthless — a vanity of vanities; and over 
against them stood the significant stillness of the Eter- 
nal, undisturbed by any change. But for the follow- 
ers of Buddha, there was a point at which this Eternal 
entered the world of temporal things, and thus there 
was for them a piece of history which maintained its 
place beside or rather directly within their religious 
teachings. This was the history of the advent of 
Buddha and the life of the communities founded by 
him. 

There is a firm recollection of the assemblies in 
which the most honored and learned leaders of the 
communities, and great bands of monks coming to- 
gether from far and wide, determined weighty points 
of doctrine and ritual. The kings under whom 
these councils were held are named, and the prede- 
cessors of these kings are mentioned even as far 
back as the pious King Bimbisara, the contemporary 
and zealous protector of Buddha. Of the series of 
kings which in this way have been fixed by the chron- 
icles of the Buddhistic order, two figures are espe- 
cially prominent — Tscha7idragupta (J. e., the one pro- 
tected by the Moon) and his grandson Asoka (the 
Painless). Tschandi'agupta is a personality well known 
to Greek and Roman historians. They call him Sa7i- 
drokyptos, and relate that after the death of Alexander 



40 



ANCIENT INDIA. 



the Great (in the year 323 B. C), he successfully op- 
posed the power of the Greeks on their invasion into 
India, and lifted himself from a humble position to 
that of ruler of a wide kingdom. Asoka, on the other 
hand, is not mentioned by the Greeks; but in one of 
his inscriptions — by him were made the oldest inscrip- 
tions discovered in India, and these have been found 
on walls and pillars in the most distant parts of the 
peninsula — he himself speaks of Antijoka, king of the 
lona (lonians, /. e., Greeks), Antikina, Alikasandara, 
and other Greek monarchs.* 

Here at last a place is reached where the his- 
torical investigator of India reaches firm ground. 
Events whose years and centuries — as though they 
occurred on another planet — are not commensurable 
with those of the earth, meet at this point with spheres 
of events which we know and are able to measure. If 
we reckon back from the fixed dates of Tschandra- 
gupta and Asoka to Buddha — and we have no grounds 
for regarding the statements of time which we find re- 
specting Buddhistic chronology as not at least ap- 
proximately correct — we find the year of the great 
teacher's death to be about 480 B. C. His work there- 
fore falls in the time at which the Greeks fought their 
battles for freedom from Persian rule, and the funda- 
mental lines of a republican constitution were drawn 
in Rome. 

Buddha's life, however, marks the extreme limit at 
which v/e may find even approximate dates. Beyond 
this, through the long centuries which must have 

* Antijoka is Antiochas Theos; Antikina, Antigonos Gonatos; Alikasandara, 
of course, not Alexander the Great, but Alexander of Epirus, son of Pyr- 
rhus, the enemy of the Romans. All these princes reigned about the middle 
of the third century B. C. Of Alexander the Great in India no traces have 
been found, with the exception of a coin which bears his picture and his name. 



THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 41 

elapsed from the beginning of the Rig Veda epoch to 
that of Buddha, the question still remains: What was 
the succession of events — the few events of which we 
may speak? What the order in which the great strata 
of literary remains were formed ? We observe the re- 
lation which one text bears to the others which appear 
to have previously existed; we follow the gradual 
changes which the language has suffered, the blotting 
out of old words and forms and the appearance of new 
ones; we count the long and short syllables of the 
verses so as to learn the imperceptible but strictly reg- 
ular course by which their rhythms have been freed 
from old laws of construction and subjected to new 
forms; moving in a parallel direction with these lin- 
guistic and metrical changes we note the changes of 
religious ideas, and of the contents as well as the ex- 
ternal forms of intellectual and spiritual life. Thus we 
learn in the chaos of this literature ever more surely to 
distinguish the old from the new, and understand the 
course of development which has run through both. 

Many a path, it is true, in which research hoped 
to press forward, has been shown to be delusive 
and worthless ; problems have had to be given up, 
changed, and presented in different forms. But in its 
last results the work has not been in vain. For, in 
respect to the Veda in particular, and the antiquities 
of India in general, we have learned to recognize the 
principal directions in which the tendencies of histor- 
ical growth are to be traced. 

From the second century of Hindu research we can 
scarcely expect discoveries similar to those which the 
first has brought: such a sudden uprising of unusual, 
broad, fruitful fields of historical knowledge. But 
we may still hope that the future of our science will 



42 ANCIENT INDIA. 

bring results of another sort no less rich — the expla- 
nation of hitherto inexplicable phenomena, the trans- 
formation of that which is half known into that which 
is fully known. 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 



OUT of all the rack and ruin of Indian antiquity, 
the most momentous objects, which the investi- 
gator can hope to render comprehensible to the modern 
reader, are the great religions of ancient India. At 
their head stands the religion embodied in the literature 
of the Veda — a belief closely related to the ancient reli- 
gions of the principal European peoples, but retaining 
in a clearer manner than they the marks of distant pre- 
historic stages, the traces of mighty commotions in 
which man's religious thought and feeling laboriously 
struggled forth from the crude confusion of primitive 
ages to nobler and more elevated forms. The religion 
of the Veda is in its turn replaced by the teaching 
of Buddha, — the one, the sternly practical religion 
of conquering shepherd-chieftains and their priests, 
the other, the world-renouncing doctrine of salvation- 
seeking monks. Far-reaching analogies interweave the 
ideals, for which the followers of the Shakya's son for- 
sook their homes for a life of wandering, with thoughts 
evolved in the Western world, especially in Greece. It 
seems practicable to reduce this development of the 
religious nature, proceeding as it did in parallel direc- 
tions among peoples so widely separated, to a single 
general formula, that would set forth the agreement of 
the various powerful impulses working among them. 



44 ANCIENT INDIA. 

It will, I trust, be permitted a fellow worker in the 
exploration of these domains, to describe and to ap- 
praise the value of the attempts which science has 
made, and is yet making, to interpret these primeval 
monuments of human searching, longing, hoping, and 
to assign to them their proper place in history. But 
dare he make the attempt to conjure forth the figures 
themselves of that prehistoric world, those rare ones 
of silver, and with them the more numerous throng of 
inferior metal : can he succeed in fixing them, even 
though he leave the outlines somewhat doubtful and 
obscure ? 



The gods and myths of earliest India became ac- 
cessible to research when the latter possessed itself of 
the Rig- Veda, a collection of more than a thousand 
hymns — the great majority of them sacrificial hymns. 
I have described in the introductory essay of this 
volume, how the knowledge of the Rig-Veda was ac- 
quired, and how by hard but rapid philological work 
its obscurities were surely and steadily overcome. A 
feeling of awe was involuntarily felt on reading those 
poems, the antiquity of whose language loomed far 
beyond the old Sanskrit of even the law-book of Manu, 
or of the great Indian epics. A sensation, as of being 
led back into the deepest past of our own Teutonic an- 
cestors, as of catching faint traces of their heart-beats 
in the first dawn of their antiquity, was quite generally 
felt, as those gods of a blood-related people arose be- 
fore us ; Agni, fire, the genial guest of human habita- 
tions ; Indra, the thundering dragon-slayer, who uses 
his boundless strength to free the waters from their 
prison j Varuna, in whom it was believed the all-em- 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 45 

bracing heavens were personified, the observer and 
avenger of even the most hidden sins ; Ushas, the 
lovely morning-blush, the dawn, who usurps the sway 
of her sister, the night, and, with a herd of ruddy 
cattle in her train traverses the firmament over, lavish- 
ing benefits and blessings. 

It so happened, in the progress of science, that the 
first glances, which fell upon these apparitions of the 
gods, starting up thus suddenly from the midst of a 
desolated field, were the glances of comparative phi- 
lologists : the same savants, who, leaping from one 
triumph to another, were at that very time engrossed 
with the work of illuminating the Greek, Latin, and 
Germanic inflexions with the light coming from the 
Sanskrit. What could be more natural than that those 
investigators should apply to mythology the same crit- 
ical method of comparison which had borne such rich 
and abundant fruits in Grammar? that they should 
seek to establish between the divinities of the Veda 
and those of ancient Europe the same kinship, the 
same identity of origin, as existed between certain 
forms of Indian and Greek verbs, for example between 
the Indian daddmi and the Greek didomi, both of which 
mean *'I give''? And so, there grew up — one might 
say, as a branch of comparative philology — a compar- 
ative mythology, which uniformly placed the philolo- 
gical points of view foremost ; and which placed spe- 
cial reliance upon the names of the divinities or de- 
mons, and then sought to estabhsh their primal na- 
tures by means of an etymological treatment of these 
names. 

In the pursuit of this course, as between the Veda 
and the European traditions, the leading part fell nat- 
urally enough to the former. For the Veda had the 



46 ANCIENT INDIA. 

benefit of all that prestige which the Sanskrit then 
enjo5^ed in philological matters, of being the chief est 
witness as to what was the first form and the first 
meaning of words. Why the word daughter should be 
thy gat er in Greek and Tochter in German, neither the 
Greek nor the German language could explain. But 
the Sanskrit did seem able to explain it. The history 
of the Sanskrit word for daughter seemed written on 
its very front. Since this word fell under the root duh 
(to milk), it seemed obvious that the daughter was 
originally the milker — a domestic idyl from remotest 
antiquity. And at length there was a sort of conviction, 
trailing at the hand of an etymology dominated by the 
Sanskrit, that we could, to repeat an expression of 
Max Miiller's, reach back into regions of the past so 
far as to believe ourselves listening to the very voices 
of the earth-born sons of Manu, 

It was in fact unavoidable, that this scientific art, 
whilst pursuing its labors with such ardor, such rich 
hopes, such confidence, should at the same time ex- 
perience within itself the calling and the capacity, to 
expound, with the help of a catalogue of Sanskrit 
roots, the primal meaning of the hitherto mysterious 
divinities of Homer, of ancient Italy, and of the Edda. 
And it must be admitted, too, that a few of these com- 
parisons and elaborations of the names of the old di- 
vinities really forced themselves upon the mind with 
overpowering conviction, and remain at this day as 
convincing as they were then. 

But with the attempt to press on beyond this very 
scanty store, an approach was ever more closely made 
to a procedure the subjective character of which seri- 
ously endangered the security of the results already 
acquired. From the endless wealth of mythological 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 47 

names, of which the Veda is literally full, the sharp 
scent of the investigators hunted out and brought to 
Hght here and there a word, which, while it may have 
had some small resemblance to a Greek name, still 
occurred but rarely in the Vedic tradition. Or if there 
were no proper noun for the divinity to be found in 
the Vedic, they would fasten upon a mere adjective. 
Or, indeed, instead of a word actually transmitted in 
the Veda, they would now and then upon their own 
responsibiHty build up a Vedic word as a counterpart 
to the name of a Greek divinity. 

Thus, in a very obscure verse of the Rig-Veda there 
appears a goddess, a female demon, Saranjus, of whose 
nature the Veda reveals next to nothing at all ; it was 
thought that the primitive* form of the Greek Erinys 
had been found. The name Saranjus, according to its 
derivation from a root sar (to hurry), seems to mean 
'^the hurrying one"; and the view was accordingly 
adopted, that she was the personification of the stormy 
thunder-cloud. And when the Greeks speak of Erinys 
as "walking in the mist," of her swinging torches in 
her hands, immediately plain confirmation was therein 
discerned for the proposition that the Erinyes, too, 
sprang from the conception of the thunder-cloud ; their 
torches are the thunder-bolts which strike down the 
impious. 

The Rig-Veda speaks of a goddess Sarama, a dog, 

*Not "primitive" in the sense that the Greek goddess was derived from 
the Indian, but in the sense that the Indo-European prototype, common alike 
to the Greek and the Indian form, in all essential respects was correctly 
represented in the Indian form. To properly appreciate the equating of the 
names Saranjus and Erinys (so, too, that of Saramejas=Hermeias [Hermes]), 
it is to be observed that the initial S of Indo-European words, which was re- 
tained in Sanskrit (as also in the Latin and Teutonic), became in the Greek, 
when followed by a vowel, either a mere aspirate or disappeared altogether ; 
thus our seven (Latin, se^tem) in Greek is written hej>fa. 



48 ANCIENT INDIA, 

who tracks the ruddy cows of the gods to their con- 
cealment when stolen ; her sons, who also have canine 
shapes and appear to play the part of genii of sleep 
and death, are named after their mother Saramejas. 
It was thought that the Greek Her7nes and Hermeias 
had been discovered here, the guide of souls into the 
realm of death, the dream-sending god of sleep. And 
here again the same root sar (to hurry) seemed to con- 
duct the mythological interpreter into the realm of the 
agitated atmosphere, just as in the case of Erinys. 
Sarania, "the hurrying one," was explained as the 
wind ; to the fleetness of the wind the dog-form of the 
goddess and her children seemed to correspond, in the 
natural symbolism of the myth. 

But the wind is not the only thing in nature which 
moves hurriedly. And hence other interpretations 
were possible. Sarania, who recovers the treasure of 
ruddy cows lost in the darkness, could she not mean 
the morning-blush, the dawn? And does not her name 
appear to resemble the name of Helena? In that case, 
the story of the Iliad is found again in one of the stand- 
ing themes of the Veda-hymns ; the siege of Troy 
would be but a repetition of the daily siege by the 
martial forces of the sun, of the entrenchments of 
night, where th« treasures of light are locked up. 

Besides Helen, there appeared in the Greek a 
whole list of goddesses representing the Indian morn- 
ing, the foremost of which was disclosed in the Vedic 
title of the dawn, Ahana. Here, it was thought, lay 
the germ from which the Greek Athene had sprung, 
the daughter of Zeus, just as in the Veda the dawn 
was called the daughter of Djaus, or Heaven. 

In conclusion, one more of these Indo-Greek com- 
binations may be cited : the one which of them all 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 49 

perhaps fared with the best luck. A part of the an- 
cient Indian fire-drill, namely, the stick which was 
kept turning to ignite the wood by its friction, was 
called pramantha. Here was revealed, so it was 
thought, the nature of the Titan form of Prometheus. 
The friend of mankind — who brought to them, de- 
spite of Zeus, fire, the fountain of all art — seemed 
here to be announced in his original character as a 
divine "rubber of fire," who afterv\^ards brings down 
the flame, which he has himself produced, to the earth. 

It is evident that in nearly all of these combina- 
tions one characteristic regularly recurs : the origin of 
the divine beings, including those which appear most 
unequivocally to represent ethical forces or influences 
active in human culture, is traced back to the powers 
of nature. Erinys was the dark storm-cloud before 
she undertook the office of avenging the misdeeds of 
men. But in the great realm of nature there were 
two regions in which these interpretations of the mean- 
ing of divinities and myths lingered with particular 
predilection : the phenomena of storm and thunder on 
the one hand, and on the other the alternation of light 
and darkness. 

At this point the leanings of investigators diverged. 
The question was much discussed as to which of the 
two classes must have produced the deepest and most 
lasting impressions upon the soul of youthful mankind, 
— those extraordinary, and, as it were, convulsive com- 
motions which agitate the atmosphere, or the calm 
majesty of the divine powers of light, daily recurring 
with uniform grandeur. 

Adalbert Kuhn was the first among those investi- 
gators who peopled the mythological landscape with 
storm-gods, cloud-nymphs, and demons of lightning. 



50 ANCIENT INDIA, 

He believed that the language of many myths was to 
be interpreted as descriptions of meteorological phe- 
nomena, the details of which — the various motions 
of rising, departing, scattering dark clouds, and of 
brighter little clouds — seemed to have been seized 
and expatiated upon with painful exactitude through 
whole lists of varying phases. According to Max Miil- 
ler, on the other hand, the main theme of the Indo- 
Germanic myths found expression in the words dawn 
and sun. To his poetically attuned imagination the 
ancient poets and thinkers stood revealed as daily des- 
crying in what we call sunrise the mystery of all mys- 
teries. The dawn was to them that unknown land 
from whose impenetrable depths life ever newly flashes 
forth. The dawn opens to the sun her golden gates, 
and whilst her gates thus stand ajar, ej^es and hearts 
yearn and struggle to peer beyond the limits of this 
finite world ; the thought of the unending, the undy- 
ing, the divine, awakens in the human soul. But 
whether storm or sunrise, all concurred in the view 
that in the Veda lay the guide which would conduct 
us to the theogony of the Indo-European peoples, — 
that there was here a system of religion to the last de- 
gree primal in character, clear and transparent, all the 
varying forms of which plainly took root in the primi- 
tive views and expressions of man upon the powers 
and processes of nature. As Max Miiller put it, the 
mythological sphynx here reveals her secret ; we can 
just barely throw a glance behind the scenes upon the 
forces whose play, upon Greek soil, achieved that 
splendid stage-effect, the majestic drama of the Olym- 
pian gods. A new direction of inquiry seemed to have 
opened to science, leading by undreamt-of paths to 
the farthest past in the life of the human soul. 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 51 

Those who first broke through these paths must 
indeed have been possessed to an unnatural degree by 
indifference and suspicion, had not a kind of intoxica- 
tion overwhelmed them as they confronted this pleni- 
tude of history, — if they had not experienced the hope 
that in the Veda they might with one bold grasp suc- 
ceed in seizing the origin of myths and of very religion 
herself, zu schauen alle Wirkenskraft und Samen. 

Have all these results — a lasting achievement, as 
it was supposed — avoided the fate of annihilation? 

II. 

An attack upon the teachings of comparative myth- 
ology, upon the belief in the prirriiiive character of the 
world of Vedic gods and legends, was slowly prepar- 
ing. It came, on the one hand, from the advances 
made in philological investigations, which stripped 
one supposed certainty after another of its plausible 
glitter. It came, on the other, from a more material 
opposition : the speculations, the criticisms, the dis- 
coveries, of a newly sprouting but sturdy offshoot of 
science, ethnology. 

We shall inquire first how the art of manipulating 
those philological problems deepened, upon which 
pretty nearly everything as taught by comparative 
mythology depended. 

In the comparison of Indian words with the Greek 
or Germanic a tendency arose to be severer, more sus- 
picious, more deliberate. And with good reason. 
Greater circumspection was observed in applying a 
principle, theretofore too frequently neglected, of first 
subjecting the word — before undertaking to draw par- 
allels between it and words of another tongue — to a 
thorough consideration within the domain of its own 



52 ANCIENT INDIA, 

language, and to an examination of it in all its con- 
nexions there, throughout the whole circle of words 
related to it. And then, afterward, when the bound- 
aries of the several great lingual families were crossed 
and the attempt made to bridge over the wide clefts 
between their respective vocabularies by means of 
their resemblances, it was insisted upon, with a strin- 
gency unknown to the earlier period, that a proper re- 
gard should be paid to individual sounds and their 
equivalent individual sounds in the kindred languages ; 
correspondences which about this time began to be 
reduced to laws of a more and more unerring charac- 
ter. The mere external resemblance of words was no 
longer worth considering — that was something subjec- 
tive and only a subjective estimate could be passed 
upon it. Now, the certain, unchangeable conditions 
were known, in obedience to which the vocal sounds 
of the parent Indo-European tongue have developed 
into the Sanskrit or the Greek or the Teutonic. Of all 
the comparisons made between mythological names, 
as alluded to, only a small minority could pass an ex- 
amination so severe, but so necessary, as was now ap- 
plied to them. In a word, it is flatly impossible that 
Prometheus should be the same word as the Indian 
pramantha ; nor can Helena be the same as Sarama, 
for the simple reason that the Greek n and the Indian 
m are not equivalent. 

And just as it resulted in these word-comparisons, 
so too the practice, once pursued with such confidence, 
of tracing words of different languages to roots, which 
were taken from the capacious granary of Sanskrit 
roots, proved more questionable in its character the 
longer it was continued. The conviction grew that 
instead of yielding to the dangerous temptation to 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 53 

read the whole origin and history of a word, or of a 
concept, from a few consonants, the coldest restraint 
ought more properly to be exercised ; and that in thou- 
sands of cases it was necessary to resignedly accept a 
word as a fixed quantity, as the proper name of such 
and such a mythological being, without endeavoring 
to practise that dangerous art upon it of detecting 
only too easily and everywhere a sunrise or a storm- 
cloud. In a word : it grew daily more evident that an 
endeavor had been made to learn too quickly, too 
much from words, and that it was high time to exam- 
ine things instead of words, to explore with greater 
patience, less prejudice, the great concrete world of 
religious and mythological ideas, instead of guessing 
about them and in reliance upon doubtful etymologies 
imposing upon them a meaning which really and at 
bottom originated in the close atmosphere of the li- 
brary. 

But let no misunderstanding arise. It is by no 
means my purpose to maintain that it was not a justi- 
fiable effort on the part of investigation, to get at the 
common inheritance from the pre-historic Indo-Euro- 
pean ages, by a comparison of the Indian, Greek, and 
German gods and legends, and thus, if possible, to 
enable the ideas of the respective peoples to mutually 
clear up and illumine both their source and their bear- 
ing. Experience alone can tell what success is to be 
attained in this way. But the measure of that success 
— though by no means wholly negative — has thus far 
justified but very modest expectations, if we consider 
such hasty results of this period as that by which Pro- 
metheus and pramantha were regarded equivalent. 

In this direction, investigation achieved results al- 
most as barren as its purely philological fruits were 



54 ANCIENT INDIA, 

abundant. As to the latter, it has in the main restored 
the paradigms of the Indo-Germanic language by the 
comparison of Indian, Greek, Latin, Germanic, and 
Slavic declensions and conjugations, and in the same 
way gotten at the processes by which the parent para- 
digms became transmuted into the paradigms of the 
filial tongues ; and it has accomplished this with evi- 
dences of growing confidence, since its successes all 
the while steadily augmented in volume — and this is 
the surest proof that the course pursued has been the 
correct one. 

The reason is manifest. The variations in forms, 
of grammatical systems, are the product of factors re- 
latively simple, which, for the most part, can be ex- 
pressed in formulae of almost mathematical certainty. 
In mythological history, on the contrary, a throng of 
varying influences are all at once in play, so complex 
and so involved that the glance in vain may seek to 
comprehend them all at once. A certain group of ideas 
at one time fades away and disappears, anon they col- 
lect again, gather closely, and again assume a definite 
concrete form. Elements, once widely separated, later 
on meet and form new combinations, which, in their 
turn, in the endeavor to assume a finished form, or to 
maintain themselves at all, are compelled to give forth 
new ideas, offshoots of themselves. Mental processes, 
which are unconsciously conducted, intersect with con- 
scious cerebrations of primitive poesy and specula- 
tion, the motives of which frequently are far removed 
and accessible only with great difficulty to modern 
habits of thought. And finally external interests, too, 
play their part : emulations of every kind, the struggle 
for property or position, vanity, and no end of other 
impulses of a similar character. And this chaotic con- 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 55 

fusion is lit up but sparsely, in spots, by the murky 
light of tradition, and with this light, only, science has 
to work. Between these dimly lighted spots are bound- 
less expanses lying in deepest gloom ; so that when 
the thread once slips from the hand of the investigator, 
he is greatly in danger of losing himself altogether. 

It is therefore easy to comprehend that the attempt 
to bridge over the vast distance between India on the 
one hand, and Greece or the Teutonic world on the 
other, has infinitely poorer chances of success in things 
pertaining to religions and legend than in the case of 
mere inflexions. Still, when all is said, there is no 
lack of specific instances where this comparison of 
Indian and European divinities has succeeded in spite 
of the difficulties presented. The twins Asvin, literally 
'^the horsemen," those radiant young divinities, who 
speed across the vault of heaven at early morn with 
their fleet chariot and to the oppressed appear as de- 
liverers from every kind of suffering, certainly corre- 
spond — of this I am firmly convinced — to the Greek 
Dioskuroi, as well as afford assistance in getting at the 
nature of the Dioskuroi. Indra, the strongest of the 
Vedic divinities, who, hurling his weapon, slays the 
dragon and liberates the imprisoned waters, is truly 
the same god as Thor in the Edda, the dragon-fighter, 
the hammer-hurler.^ Both in India and in the Teutonic 



INote that both in the comparison Indra=Thor, as well as in that of 
Asvin=Dioskuroi, the names fail philologically to agree. As remarked be. 
fore, the attempt has been made to draw a parallel between the Greek Hermes 
and the Indian dog-divinity Sarameyas. Hermes really belongs, with greater 
show of reason, to a classification with the Vedic god Pushan, who, like 
Hermes, rules as protector over roads and travellers, like him is the messen- 
ger of the gods, and acts as escort of souls into the future life, and like Hermes 
protects herds and reveals lucky treasures. The juxtaposition of the material 
qualities of ideas thus leads to results absolutely independent of any assis- 
tance to be gotten from the etymological comparison of names. 



56 ANCIENT INDIA. 

north the storm-god of the Indo-Europeans has pre- 
served a uniformity of nature which is at once recog- 
nisable. But, to repeat, the stock of such compari- 
sons which can safely be maintained, is a very modest 
one, and we hardly have reason to form hopes of ob- 
taining greater successes of this sort in the future than 
we have obtained in the past. 

III. 

More decisive than the reformation accomplished 
within philology itself, the course of which we traced 
in the last section, was the influence on Vedic research 
of a new class of inquiries, which were far removed from 
the domain of comparative philology and of Sanskrit, 
and which tended to overthrow altogether the belief 
that the Veda was the representative type of every 
primitive religion and mythology. We refer to the 
researches of the comparative ethnologists who were 
now making a highly comprehensive and systematic 
study of the elusive forms which the religious senti- 
ment, the cult, the myth-creating phantasy of modern 
peoples assumed in the lower and the lowest stages of 
civilisation. 

And here a discovery of the utmost import was 
made, the honors of which belong first of all to Eng- 
lish investigators such as Tylor and Lang, and along 
with them to an excellent German scholar, Wilhelm 
Mannhardt. It was found that, very much like their 
weapons and utensils, so too the religion of the lowest 
orders of man, the whole world over, was everywhere 
one and the same in its essential elements. By some 
intrinsic necessity, there is always imposed upon this 
low state of evolution just this particular type of ideas 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 57 

and customs, which is the normal one, and as such 
may be looked for with absolute certainty. 

This type of belief and cult, which is only faintly 
idealistic, and is dominated by thoroughly harsh and 
practical views, we shall describe at some length far- 
ther on. At this point we have simply to remark upon 
the evident conclusion to be drawn from these obser- 
vations, that the ancestors, also of those peoples, which 
we meet with in historic times as the possessors of 
most opulent civilisations, must, in some prehistoric 
age, however remote, have gone through just such a 
savage period of religious and ritualistic development. 

This fact established, there was at once opened to 
scholars who did not deem it beneath them to learn 
something from American Indians, negroes, and Aus- 
tralians, a source of highly important data drawn di- 
rectly from the mouths of living witnesses, by which 
it was possible to reveal prehistoric epochs antedating 
even the Homeric or Vedic religions, and preparatory 
to them. Reasoning from the ideas of modern savages, 
to the ideas obtaining in the prehistoric savage state 
of subsequently civilised peoples, may have seemed a 
hazardous undertaking ; but there was a sure correc- 
tive for the procedure. It is well-known that in all 
transitions of lower civilisations to higher, many ele- 
ments of the old condition persist and hold over in the 
new, and that the spirit of the new can neither destroy 
nor assimilate them. They persist as survivals of the 
past in the midst of altered surroundings, and are ab- 
solutely unintelligible to people who know only the 
tendency and ways of the new period ; they can be 
explained only from the point of view of the time in 
which they originated — a time when they were active 



58 ANCIENT INDIA. 

principles, — a time, the tracks of which they preserve, 
as it were, in a fossil condition. 

Now if our view is correct, such survivals must be 
found at every step in a mythology and a cult like the 
Veda — and, we might likewise say, in the mythology 
and cult of Homer ; they must be the special lurking- 
places of whatever appears to be irrational, odd, self- 
contradictory, and difficult of exposition. But, on the 
other hand, whatever in those poems seems incompre- 
hensible to the man of to-day must become intelligible 
as soon as the art is acquired of looking at it from the 
standpoint of the modern savage and with the help of 
his peculiar logic, both of which are often totally dis- 
tinct from ours. 

As a matter of fact, the moment a search was made 
through the ancient Indian and the related European 
civilisations for such remains of prehistoric and an- 
ticipatory culture, the conviction forced itself irresist- 
ibly on scholars that the correct method had at last been 
discovered. Problems quickly resolved themselves, 
which theretofore dared scarcely be approached. The 
most striking agreements were disclosed between the 
various types of myth and cult scattered at this very 
day over the earth among our savages and barbarians, 
and the type of myth and cult which had lain imbedded 
in the Veda as a mass of unintelligible facts, wholly ir- 
reconcilable with any interpretation derived from the 
known intellectual character of the Vedic world. 

The chain of proof was thus rendered continuous 
and conclusive. Science had succeeded (or at least 
was steadily advancing toward success) — not by means 
of bare grammatical speculations or the study of San- 
skrit roots, but by inquiries which rested at every point 
upon a basis of living fact — in showing that there was 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 59 

a certain elementary state at the beginning of all civil- 
isations and in disclosing the gray, early dawn anticipa- 
tory of the broad daylight of their history. This was a 
revelation, which — however gradually and modestly it 
asserted itself — is perhaps of even farther-reaching im- 
portance in the exploration of antiquity than those 
brilliant exploits of the philologist's finished art which 
has opened the way to the remote recesses of Egyptian 
and Babylonian civilisation. 

As a result of this discovery, a place was given to 
the religion and mythology of the Veda widely differ- 
ent from that which the enthusiasm of its earlier stu- 
dents had sought to assign to them. The assumption 
that the Veda revealed the secret of the elementary 
formative processes of creed and cult, was thus shown 
to be as far wide of the mark, as it would have been 
to have considered the grammar of the Sanskrit, the 
complexity of which points to an infinitely long prep- 
aratory history, as the elemental grammar of human 
speech. The fact is, it is not true, as the supposition 
had been up to that time, that the myth-building phan- 
tasy of man is revealed in its natural processes in the 
Veda, as plainly as a clock housed in glass reveals all 
its wheels and works. The Vedic divinities, the Vedic 
sacrifices, are not primitive and transparent products 
of the original creative force of religion, but for the 
most part turn out, on close scrutinisation, to be an- 
cient, obscure, and complex creations. 

We shall next attempt a description of the age pre- 
ceding the Vedic religion, and also of that religion 
itself, as both appear from the point of view here 
sketched.* 

*I have given this subject a more detailed treatment in my book The Re- 
ligion of the Veda. (1894.) 



6o ANCIENT INDIA. 



IV. 

The fundamental nature of the primary Indian re- 
ligion, surviving from the very remotest antiquity and 
rising to the surface of the Vedic times as a more or 
less ruinous wreckage, is, as we have seen, essentially 
that of the savage's religion. According to this, all 
existence appears animated with spirits, whose con- 
fused masses crowd upon each other, buzzing, flock- 
ing, swarming along with the phantom souls of the 
dead, and act, each according to its nature, in every 
occurrence. If a human being fall ill, it is a spirit 
that has taken possession of him and imposes upon 
him his ills. The patient is cured by enticing the spirit 
from him with magic. A spirit dwells in the flying 
arrow. He who shoots off an arrow performs a bit of 
magic which puts this spirit into action. The spirits 
have sometimes human, sometimes animal form. 
Neither form is nobler or lower than the other, for as 
yet no distinction between the human and bestial na- 
ture has been made. In fact, man is usually looked 
upon as descended from the animal; the tribes of men 
are called bears, wolves, snakes, and the individuals 
of the animal genus after which they are thus called 
are treated by tlie tribes as their blood-relations. 

As they move hither and thither, the spirits may 
select a domicile, abiding or temporary, in some vis- 
ible object. A feather, or a bone, or a stone at differ- 
ent times holds the spirit; and anon the spirit steals 
into a human being whom it makes ill, or throws into 
convulsions in which supernatural visions come to 
him and in which the spirit talks through him in con- 
fused phrases. 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 6i 

And just as man at this stage of development lives 
only for the moment, thrown unresistingly to and fro 
by all sorts of vacillatory influences, such naturally is 
the way of the spirits. The spirits of savages are 
themselves savages, greedy, superstitious, easily ex- 
citable. The man of skill, the magician, who as yet 
occupies the place filled at a later period by the priest, 
knows the art — first anticipatory hints of a cult — of 
flattering the spirits ; he understands how to bar their 
passage, to terrify them, to deceive them, to compel 
them, to provoke them against his enemy. They are 
washed away with water ; they are consumed by fire ; 
even the friendly spirits, whenever they prove themselves 
intractable, are subjected to the same sort of irreverent 
treatment. It is apparent that this religion knows of 
nothing possessing a majesty which at all rises above 
the level of human life. An appreciation, an estimate 
of differences of magnitude and of degree have not as 
yet been formed. Animal, man, spirit, are mixed up 
together, all more or less equal in their power and in 
their rights. 

But gradually the chaos of these ideas clarifies. 
The great begins to separate itself from the little, the 
noble from the base. A calmer survey of the world 
obtains. 

And so, out of all the confusion of forces working in 
the shape of spirits, the great powers of nature more 
and more emerge and assume the first position. Their 
action, reaching far beyond human control into the 
farthest regions of space, the same to-day as yesterday 
and to-morrow as to-day, invincible to all human op- 
position, is ever more felt to be decisive of destinies ; 
— the more so, as the various branches of human in- 
dustry (cattle breeding and agriculture) make improve- 



62 ANCIENT INDIA. 

merit and hence intensify man's sensitiveness to the 
favorable and unfavorable phenomena of nature. It is, 
therefore, the normal characteristic of vast stretches 
of historical development that the great powers of 
nature, such as the heavens, sun, moon, storm, thun- 
der, and with these the terrestrial element of fire and 
the earth itself (usually first in importance in this 
class), appear as the highes.t givers of blessings and 
rulers of all that happens. They are superior to man 
and are at a distance from him, as befits divinity. For 
the embodiment of them into a living personification, 
the more perfect form of man steadily secures the pref- 
erence over that of the brute. It was only possible 
to deify the torpid brute so long as man failed to feel^ 
himself as something better than the brute. 

Of course the animal figure does not disappear ab- 
solutely and at a single blow from the midst of the 
divinities. Subordinate divinities, standing in the 
background and thus remaining untouched by the 
ennobling tendencies, were allowed to retain their old 
animal form. Or, an animal, which was once itself a 
god, might, after the god had been exalted to the dig- 
nity of human form, remain to the latter as a special 
attribute, as a sort of celestial domestic animal, — as, 
for illustration^ demons which were once of the shape 
of horses, being raised to gods with the shape of man, 
would thereafter appear as riding upon celestial horses. 
Or, some part of the body of the original animal form 
might be retained as a part of the newer human form 
of the god ; or something emblematic of the animal be 
af^xed externally in some way, and thus retain a trace 
of the old conception which had been overthrown. 
And wherever a plastic art has developed established 
forms, as in Egypt or in Mexico, and is consequently 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 63 

strongly conservative in retaining venerable traditions, 
the animal-gods, cut in stone, may expect to maintain 
themselves for a longer time than they could wher- 
ever, as was the case in India in the time of the Veda, 
they lived in the airy realm of the imagination. 

In the same manner, the practice of considering 
stone and wood as fetishes embodying the spirits, 
while not disappearing suddenly and wholly, yet un- 
avoidably withdraws from the foreground. The spook- 
ish, magical conception of spirits slipping stealthily 
from one home to another in matter of every shape 
and kind loses ground. The figures of the divinities 
obtain surer forms, each with peculiar outlines of its 
own, and their dignity, at once human and super- 
natural, is firmly established. Though far from ap- 
proaching to that ideal of sanctity to which a later 
age will attain ; though they are still animated by 
egotism, passions, caprices of every sort, — yet, ac- 
companying it all, a certain amount of constancy be- 
comes manifest in them, and in all their doings there 
is evident the steady growth of connected deliberation 
and plan. Very often the tendency develops of trans- 
fering to these divinities the role of kindly dispensers 
of bounties, while, on the other hand, the occupation 
of doing injury, of causing illness and harm of every 
sort, is still allotted to inferior demons, gnomes, goblin 
spirits, which in their essentials keep on a level with 
sorcery of the earlier religion, and against which the 
old arts of spell and exorcism are effective, — arts, 
which, be it observed, are of no avail against the 
higher power of the new great divinities. 

The intercourse of man with these new gods at- 
tunes itself to another key. He is studious to gratify 
the immortals, powerful beings, willingly inclining 



64 ANCIENT INDIA. 

themselves to favor, when approached with gifts. He 
invites them to food and drink and they yield to his 
solicitation ; not, however, with the bluster and din 
of the spirits exorcised by the old sorcerers, but in 
calm grandeur the invisible gods approach their ador- 
srs. The distinctive seal, now stamped upon cult, is 
henceforth, and for long periods of time, sacrifice and 
prayer. 

It is at this point that it becomes clear what the 
proper position of the Vedic religious belief is. Not 
all perhaps, but yet all the chief and dominant of the 
Vedic divinities are based upon a personification of 
natural forces, in forms of superhuman magnitude. 
The dwelling-place of the most of them is the atmos- 
phere or the heavens. The word devas (the god), 
which the Indians had received from the Indo-Ger- 
manic past and which is to be found among many of 
the related branches of the family,* meant originally 
**the heavenly one." And thus the belief, which ele- 
vates the divinities above human kind to a heavenly 
height, was firmly fixed and long antedates the times 
of the Veda. 

From it all, we see at the first glance that with the 
Veda we are dealing with a stage of development which 
must have been preceded by a long prior history. And 
we find a confirmation for such a view, which, as was 
explained above, might be expected in a case of this 
kind : the types of divinities, or rather of spirits, char- 
acteristic of more primitive stages of development, are 
profusely apparent throughout the world of Vedic di- 
vinities. The divinities themselves — heavenly human 



♦ Thus, Latin: divus, deus. Ancient Gallic: devo-, divo-. Lithuanian: 
dSvas. Old Prussian: deiwas. Ancient Norse (in which, according to rules 
of consonantalchange, t instead of ^appears): tivar, the gods 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 65 

beings, exalted to a colossal magnitude, in agreement 
with the general religious thought of the Vedic age — 
retain numerous, not wholly obliterated, marks of their 
ancient animal form. Demons of animal shape, like 
"the serpent from the earth," '*the one-footed goat," 
surround the world of man-resembling divinities, and 
form a back-ground for them. And the gods them- 
selves are, in certain rites,— although exceptionally, as 
may be imagined, — represented fetish-like as embod- 
ied in animals, sometimes too in inanimate objects. 
A steed represents Agni, the fleet god of fire ; an ox, 
Indra, who is strong as one. 

Further, there are plain relics visible in the Veda 
of the belief so characteristic of the savage races : the 
behef in the blood-relationship between certain human 
families and certain animal species. 

Again, in India as elsewhere, there appear along 
with the grand divinities, which are mainly beneficent 
and are raised by the advance of thought to purer 
forms, those spirits by which the savage imagines he 
is encircled. They are those cobolds, malicious sprites, 
spirits of illness, which we may say belong to the 
Stone Age of religion, which are obdurate to any his- 
torical growth, and yet are found with the same char- 
acteristics among all peoples ; gliding about in human 
and animal forms and misshapes— by day and by night, 
but especially night— everywhere, but with a marked 
partiality for cross-roads, grave-yards, and other such 
dismal places ; stealing into man, cheating him, con- 
fusing his mind, gnawing at his fl-ssh, sucking up his 
blood, waylaying his women, drinking up the milk of his 
cows. And finally, along with these spirits, and charac- 
teristic of the same primitive notions, there appear, in 
the belief of the Veda, the souls of the dead,— those of 



66 ANCIENT INDIA. 

ancestors kindly watching over the destinies of their 
children, — and treacherous, inimical souls : a domain 
in which the Veda has retained in especial abundance, 
and scarcely concealed beneath the veil spread over 
them by its advanced ideas, the remains of a savage 
and most crude religious life. 

If we turn, now, from these survivals of a distant 
past, to the great divinities, which are characteristic- 
ally the figure-heads of the religion of the Veda, we 
shall find that the stage at which the work of deifying 
the powers of the air and of the heavens is usually ac- 
complished, has been quite appreciably passed. While 
these divinities, too, have sprung from early ideas of 
nature, the roots which they there struck have with-, 
ered or are at least touched with incipient decay ; the 
original meaning taken from nature is either forgotten 
or misunderstood. The mightiest of the Vedic gods, 
Indra, was once the thunderer, who batters open the 
cloud-cliffs with his weapon of lightning and frees the 
torrents of rain ; — in the hymns of the Veda he has 
faded into the very different figure of the divine herOy 
physically strongest of the gods, the conferrer of vic- 
tories, he who performs all the most powerful feats and 
lavishes inexhaustible treasures. The Vedic poets do, 
indeed, tell that legend of Indra, which was once the 
legend of the thunder, of the slaying of the serpent 
and the opening of the cliff; but in their recital it is 
all distorted. The cliff, which Indra's weapon splits, 
is no longer the cloud, but a literal terrestrial cliff ; 
and the rivers which he releases are actual terrestrial 
rivers. The conception of thunder has thus wholly 
disappeared from the myth of Indra and there has 
only remained the story that the strongest of the gods 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 67 

had split a wall of rock with his marvellous weapon 
and that the streams had poured forth from it. 

The same process of fading out has befallen a num- 
ber of other of these great natural divinities. The two 
Asvin, the Dioskuroi of the Greeks, have lost their 
meaning of morning and evening star. In the Vedic 
creed their essential characteristic is that they are the 
deliverers of the oppressed from all kinds of suffering. 
Varuna, in his original character a lunar divinity, was 
transformed into that of a heavenly king, the observer 
and punisher of all sins ; and the single characteristic, 
that he is the divine ruler of the night, alone shows 
an obscure mark of his long-forgotten real nature. 

In this way the deified forces of nature were trans- 
muted into immortal masters, and protectors of the 
different conditions and interests of human life. The 
process is readily comprehended. The lively feeling 
of owing everything good to the powers of nature, in 
itself no mean advance upon the earlier crude concep- 
tions, unavoidably dulls with time. The growing co- 
hesion and order of society, the more extensive char- 
acter of all the enterprises of peace and war at this 
stage, allows new trains of ideas to press to the front. 
The power of the king and war-hero now forces itself 
upon the attention as decisive of destiny ; and accord- 
ingly in those divinities who personified nature in the 
forms of preternatural men, the element of nature re- 
cedes more and more before the element derived from 
man. The suggestion of the morning star, or of the 
moon, pales before the stronger consciousness of being 
under the merciful protection or the corrective power 
of heroic and royal divine masters. 

These divine lords, as they are pictured in the 
Veda, all possess strong family resemblances. They 



68 ANCIENT INDIA. 

are all very powerful, very glorious, very wise, very 
ready in aid. They all stand out in uniformly Ti- 
tanic stature, each one like his fellows, but poor in the 
possession of that matchless beauty in which the Greek 
saw his gods standing glorious before him. Zeus knits 
his dark brows, his ambrosial locks tumble forwards, 
and the Olympic heights tremble ; the barbaric god of 
the Veda ''whets his horns and shakes them power- 
fully like a bull," the same sort of expression as that 
with which an early Chaldaic hymn, standing at about 
the same point of evolution, says of its god, "that he 
lifts his horns like a wild bull." As yet, religious thought 
and feeling have not advanced the idea of divinity 
from the point of grandeur to that of infinity, from 
power to omnipotency, and have not in particular 
taken the step from multiplicity to unity. 

A single God is created by a history like that of the 
Old Testament, which, in the stress of great national 
experiences, in triumph and in defeat, so intimately 
binds a people with the divinity that controls its des- 
tiny, that beside it all other gods disappear. Or, a 
single God may be created by reflexion seeking over 
and beyond the heights and depths of existence the 
one loftiest height or the one inmost germ of all things. 
The former is the god of heroes and patriots ; the 
latter the still, Calm divinity of the solitary speculator. 
But the bards of the Veda were neither patriots nor 
philosophers. The peace and comfortable existence 
of ancient India, the dispassionate character of the 
popular soul, to which a deep and intense attachment 
to its own national existence remained unknown, were 
but rarely disturbed by national misfortunes or pas- 
sions such as those with which the history of Israel is 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 69 

filled.* And that impulse of philosophical reflexion 
toward unity in the confusion of phenomena is as yet 
foreign to the age whose religious beliefs we are here 
describing. Such an impulse does not begin to show 
itself until the time of some of the latest poems of the 
Rig-veda, then, however, growing in the succeeding 
era to irresistible strength. 

The same multiplicity of gods, therefore, prevails 
in the Veda as of old — not the clean-cut result of a 
methodical partition, so to speak, of the administra- 
tive offices of the world's affairs among divine officials, 
but the complex product of manifold historical pro- 

*To appreciate thoroughly the difference in the whole tone of historical 
and religious sentiment in the Veda and in the Old Testament, compare two 
songs which in a measure occupy corresponding positions in the two litera- 
tures—the Song of the Victory of King Suda (Rig-veda, 7, 18) and the Triumphal 
Song of Deborah (Judges, v). Both belong to the earliest poetical monuments 
—are possibly the oldest— of the nation from which they emanate. Both 
glorify hardly-won victories ; the details of the two battles bear great resem- 
blance to each other, so far as may be judged from the vacillating floods of 
the two hymns of victory. In each a swollen stream brought destruction to 
the foe. 

But how differently does the song of the heroic-souled Jewish patriotess 
resound from that of the Brahmanic court-priest and poet. In the former, 
every word glows v/ith passion, with a drunken joy of victory. Every whit of 
its energy is strained for the fight, the people staked its very soul upon the 
issue. Jehovah marched forth and all nature joined in the combat; the 
clouds deluged the earth with waters ; the stars in their courses contended 
against Sisera. We see the hostile leader collapse before the shepherd wo- 
man, who gave him milk when he asked for water, and struck him down with 
her hammer. We see his mother gazing after him and moaning at the window 
lattice, " Why tarry the wheels of his chariots ? " 

How different is the atmosphere of the Indian poem I In the foreground 
stands the priest, busily and successfully performing his office, 

"As in pasture rich and fat the cow 
Drips milk, so Vashtha's song dripped over thee, 
O Indra I Master of the herds art thou, 
All say. Incline, accept our noblest offering." 

The foe fled like cattle from the pasture when they have lost their herder. 
Indra struck them down the moment the votive offering was cast upon his 
altar ; all the offered sweets he gave to Sudas to enjoy. What glimpse do we 
catch here of anxiety and of the outburst of prodigious passion on the part of 
a people battling for its existence I 



70 ANCIENT INDIA. 

cesses, of a kind of ''struggle for existence" between 
ideas, on the one hand, whose value for the religious 
consciousness has dwindled away but which often 
maintain themselves more or less by a sheer faculty of 
pertinacity and those ideas which press into promi- 
nence through being favored by the advance of intel- 
lectual and material life. 

A final very marked characteristic of these divini- 
ties is that the phantasy of their adorers by no means 
raised them to the highest level of moral majesty, as 
they did to positions of the greatest power and highest 
glory. This step of incomparable importance in the 
evolution of religion — the association of the ideas of 
God and good — as yet can be descried in but a few 
faint signs, and this state most surely marks the reli-" 
gion as still a barbaric one. At this stage, the thing 
most essential to the needs of the devout is that the 
God be a strong and kindly ruler, and of an easily in- 
fluenced disposition. But how was it possible that 
the mighty thunderer of pre-Vedic times, or the mighty 
warrior and bestower of blessings of the Vedic reli- 
gion, Indra, should be formed of other ethical stuff 
than they, whose image he was, the terrestrial grands 
seigneurs'^ The savage battles which fill his existence 
alternate with savage adventures of love and drink. 
Very little does he inquire into the sinfulness or recti- 
tude of mankind ; but all the more is he desirous of 
knowing who has slaughtered oxen on his altar and 
brought as an offering his favorite drink, the intoxi- 
cating soma, whose streams "pour into him as rivers 
into the ocean," and ''fill his belly, head, and arms." 
And it occasionally happens that he is not over par- 
ticular about remembering the wishes which his wor- 
shippers have preferred in their prayers, as when re- 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 71 

turning in the best of humor to his dwelling from a 
sacrifice in his honor, he says : *'This is what I will 
do, — no, that : I'll give him a cow ! — or shall it be a 
horse ? I wonder if I have really had soma from him 
to drink?" 

Still, if one were to contemplate the picture of the 
Vedic divinities from this position only, he would be 
apt to falsely appreciate the manifold complexity of 
the intermingling currents. Distinct, it may be they 
were, originally, from the conceptions formed of the 
gods, yet the ideas of right and wrong, the sympathy 
naturally felt with the candid and fair man, the repu- 
diation of tortuous treachery, dread of the chains im- 
posed by guilt whether deliberate or unintentional, all 
this, of course, is well known to the Vedic world, and 
is expressed with sufficient vivacity in the Vedic poetry. 
And why, indeed, should not this domain of human 
interests and laws also find its rulers and representa- 
tives among the heavenly beings as well as war, or 
man's daily occupation, or his domestic life ? 

Although, therefore, the Vedic divinities as such 
and taken as a whole manifest no special character of 
holiness or rectitude, properly speaking, there is among 
them one particular divinity, Varuna, — originally a lu- 
nar divinity, as already said, — who assumes, as pecu- 
liarly his own, the office of caring for the mundane 
moral order — assisted by a circle of less prominent 
companions, who were originally, it is possible, the 
sun and the planets. This moral order is looked upon 
as having been originally established by Varuna, and 
by Varuna's strong arm and sorcery it is preserved. 
Varuna detects even the most secret transgression ; 
his snares are set for the treacherous ; he sends forth 
his avenging spirits ; he threatens the guilty with mis- 



72 



ANCIENT INDIA. 



fortune, illness, death. He suffers his forgiveness and 
pardon to shield the penitent, who make effort to ap- 
pease him. 

In a song of the Rig-veda, a guilt-laden one, pur- 
sued by disaster, cries: ''I commune thus with my- 
self : When may I again approach Varuna ? What 
offering will he deign to accept, without showing an- 
ger ? When shall I, my soul reviving, behold again 
his favor? Humbly, as a servant, will I make repara- 
tion to him, merciful that he is, that I may be once 
more blameless. To them that are thoughtless, the 
god of the Aryans has given prudence ; wiser than the 
knowing man, he advances them to riches." 

Varuna is here called the Aryan god. The his- 
torian, however, can hardly approve the bard's claim, 
for I believe we can discover in the apparently Ar- 
yan form of this god the signs of an un-Aryan deriva- 
tion. This much at all events is certain : that faith 
in their chief protector of the right extends backward 
into the epoch when the ancestors of the Indians 
still formed one people with the ancestors of the 
Iranians, as they hesitated on the threshold of the 
Indian peninsula. This god appears among the Indo- 
Iranians as Varuna, among the Iranians (in the re- 
ligion of Zoroaster) as the chief ruler of all that is 
good, Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd. We cannot trace 
Varuna beyond the age of the Indo-Iranians into the 
prior time of the Indo-Europeans. Among the related 
peoples, like the Greeks or Teutons, we find no signs 
of him. Much, on the contrary, seems to me to agree 
in favor of the view that the Indo-Iranians had re- 
ceived this god from without, from the regions sub- 
ject to Babylonian civilisation. If I am right in this 
conjecture, is it to be looked upon as merely fortu- 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 73 

itous that right at the time when the remotest Semitic 
and pre-Semitic civilisation had fructified the rehgion 
of the Aryans, the point lies where the figure of the 
sin-avenging and sin-forgiving Varuna begins to sepa- 
rate from the primeval coarseness of such bruiser and 
tippler divinities as Indra, and to be distinguished by 
the sublime traits of sanctity and divine mercy ? 

It has been remarked that the cult devoted to di- 
vinities, at the point of the evolution of the Veda, 
chiefly assumes the form of the sacrifice. The gods 
have so far grown beyond human dimensions that the 
magic spells which could compel them at the will of 
man, no longer appear as the proper agency with 
which to influence them. And on the other hand, 
they are as yet too far removed from pure spirituality 
for a purely spiritual form of adoration. The wor- 
shipper may and must make himself acceptable to 
them by the simplest measures, industriously, loudly, 
even obtrusively. Resembling man as they do, they 
eat and drink like men. Accordingly offerings of 
food and intoxicating drink were needful, in order 
to fortify them and to stir them to mighty actions. 
They had to be flattered ; they were to be addressed 
in the most artfully agreeable style, and in the most 
superlative expressions possible as to their grandeur 
and their splendor. Thereupon is the proper moment 
for the worshippers, who sit around the sacrificial cere- 
mony "like flies about honey," to lay their desires 
before the gods : desires which — corresponding to the 
spirit of the age — are ever directed to the palpable 
goods of earthly existence, — a long life, posterity, the 
acquisition of property in horses and cattle, favorable 
weather, triumph over all enemies. The art of prop- 
erly performing these sacrifices and prayers is the 



74 ANCIENT INDIA. 

main theme about which the whole spiritual life of 
the poets of the Rig-veda revolves. To them the sac- 
rifice is the embodiment of all mysteries, the symbol 
of all the most important and profound of the phe- 
nomena of life. "By means of sacrifices, the gods 
offered sacrifices, — those were the first of all laws," 
says the Rig-Veda. 

The external marks of the Vedic sacrifice are so 
far simple, that as yet all the elements are wanting to 
it, which follow in the train of urban life and espe- 
cially of the development of the fine arts. There are 
no temples, no images of the divinities. The cult of 
shepherd tribes, whose migratory manner of life has 
not yet entirely become a fixed one, is as yet satisfied 
with a very simple altar, — established with the same 
facility everywhere, — the level, cleared greensward, 
over which soft grass is strewn, about the holy fires, 
as a resting-place for the invisible gods, who quickly 
collect from the atmospheric regions around. 

But there is no lack of artful embellishment of an- 
other kind in the Vedic sacrifice, — or even of an over- 
embellishment, according to Oriental custom. The 
song of praise and prayer, delivered at the sacrifice, 
is fashioned after the rules of an elaborate art, grow- 
ing ever more intricate. It is overladen with obscure 
allusions, in which theological mysticism parades its 
acquaintance with the hidden depths and crannies of 
things divine. To utter such a prayer and to offer up 
such a sacrifice not every one is called or fitted whom 
the inner impulse moves, but only the trained priest, 
one belonging to certain families who have formed an 
exclusive spiritual caste from time immemorial, — the 
priest who alone is accounted equal to the perilous, 
sacred duty of eating of the sacrificial feast, and to 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 75 

drink of the soma, the intoxicating drink of the gods. 
At sacrificial ceremonies of greater importance priests 
of this kind appear in throngs, singing, reciting, and 
performing the immense number of prescribed acts 
with that painful, purely external nicety which is pe- 
culiar to every cult standing at this point of historical 
development, and the displacement of which by the 
inner soul-life is everywhere the product of protracted 
later evolution. 

Religious ceremony of this sort is, indeed, far from 
having attained to the "affair of conscience'' of the de- 
vout believer — to the elevation of a force which exalts 
and clarifies his inner life. It is — conducted on a 
large scale and with reference to human interests as a 
whole — simply ^hat the cult of sorcery of an earlier 
age had been in a small way and with reference to 
some particular human want : a practice which any 
one, who could bear the expense, might have put into 
motion for himself by the skilled practitioner, to en- 
rich one's self, to prolong life, to avert sickness and 
all harm. 

But here there is repeated, in matters purely of 
cult, the same characteristic which confronted us in 
another connexion. Alongside of and interwoven with 
the formations which carry the special imprint of Vedic 
culture, everywhere and often in compact masses, 
there are the remains of hoary constructions, traceable 
to remoter and even to remotest times. As just re- 
marked, it is a pecuharity of the Vedic cult of the 
sacrifice, that it concerns itself chiefly with human in- 
terests viewed as a whole ; but still it was an unavoid- 
able retention, that the supernatural forces should be 
put into action, upon occasion, for individual and par- 
ticular situations, in behalf of want or suffering at some 



76 ANCIENT INDIA. 

particular moment. It is here that the old witchcraft 
especially retained whatever was left to it of its former 
importance, in the Vedic age. He who wished to 
drive away evil spirits, or the substance supposed to 
have brought an illness, or, similarly, some guilt, had 
recourse still, as in former ages, to fire, which con- 
sumes the hostile thing, or to water which washes it 
away, or he chased the spirits away with din and 
alarms, blows and bow-shot. He who wished to pro- 
duce rain, proceeded much like the rain-conjurer 
among the savages of our day. He put on black robes, 
and slew in sacrifice some black-colored beast, in or- 
der to attract the black clouds with which it was de- 
signed to cover the sky ; or, he threw herbs into the 
water that the grass of his pastures might be splattered 
by the divine waters. He who wished to prepare him- 
self for particularly holy rites, acted just as the mod- 
ern savage does, when he strives to transport himself 
into the exalted state in which man may enjoy com- 
munion with the gods. One about to perform the sac- 
rifice of the soma, prepared himself for his holy labor, 
clad in dark-colored skins, muttering in stuttering 
speech, fasting until ''there is nothing left in him, 
nothing but skin and bones, till the black pupil disap- 
pears from his eye," maintaining his position beside 
the magic fire which frightened away the evil demons, 
thus producing within him the necessary condition of 
inner fever {tapas^; a practice, which lies in the midst 
of the Vedic ritual as an unintelligible relic of by-gone 
ages,- but which a modern American Indian or a Zulu 
would comprehend at once, since very similar customs 
are familiar to him. 

Thus, the religion and the cult of the Veda point 
on the one hand to the past of the savage religion j on 



THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 77 

the other hand, they point forward. We have seen 
that the majority of the Vedic divinities had long since 
lost their original meaning. Indra is no more the 
thunderer ; nor Varuna the night-illuminating planet. 
For a time the faded images of the powers, which were 
once effective in their influence upon human faith, 
maintain their entity by the sheer force of pertinacity 
— similar to a movement, which, receiving no fresh 
impulse, gradually dies away. The point will come 
at which the motion will cease. The intellect, pressing 
onward, recognises other forces as the effective. New 
exigencies of the soul require to be satisfied by other 
means than those proffered by the benevolence of In- 
dra or Agni. 



BUDDHISM. 



HAVING in the preceding essay sought to establish 
the position which the earliest form of the Indian 
religion properly occupies in the great process of the 
evolution of religion, the task presents itself of at- 
tempting to fix a similar historical position for a later 
stage of the same growth, namely for ancient Bud- 
dhism, — one of those structures in the history of re- 
ligion, which, as a complete expression of deepest 
content, may well be classified with the classic types 
of human religion and human pursuit of salvation. 



The prevailing mood and, even more yet, the forms 
of mental expression in which the thought and life of 
the mendicant Buddhist monks revolved possess an 
almost contemporary double upon Greek soil : the cre- 
ations of the West and the East corresponding closely 
to each other to an astonishing degree, in matters the 
most essential as well as in the most subordinate, even 
to the coining of rally-words about which the religious 
consciousness loves to concentrate, or to the drawing 
of similes which aim to make the grand direction of 
events in some sort palpable to the imagination, and 
which, while apparently of inferior import, often really 
belong to the most powerful factors of religion. 



BUDDHISM, 79 

It is plainly no mere accident that a harmony be- 
tween the ideas of two people, so widely separated 
both in space and national characteristics, should be 
so much more strongly and variously accentuated, 
just at the period of evolution of which we are here 
speaking, than it was before that time. The myth- 
building imagination which holds sway during the 
earlier periods, proceeds without aim or method upon 
its course. It receives its impulse from chance ; acci- 
dent combines in it capriciously materials widely di- 
vergent in character ; as if at play, accident pours 
into its lap, out of a copious horn, forms which are 
sometimes of noteworthy depth and meaning, some- 
times absurd, but which are ever changing and dis- 
placing each other. But when reflexion, presently 
developing into sustained and systematic investiga- 
tion, takes a grasp of some firmness and certainty on 
the problems of the cosmos and human existence, the 
scope of possibilities contracts. However untrained 
the mind may be in this age, yet the things that ap- 
pear to it perforce as realities, go far to compel hu- 
man ideas into a fixed and constrained course, like 
a stream into its bed; and thus the most manifold 
lineaments, showing remarkable resemblances to each 
other, are similarly impressed upon analogous courses 
of thought in widely different parts of the world, as 
was the case with those which preoccupied the Greek 
and Indian minds. 

Being wholly without any knowledge as to the time- 
limitations of Vedic antiquity, we can hardly attempt 
to estimate the number of centuries lying between 
the origin of the Rig- Veda hymns and the rise of Bud- 
dha, the founder of the Buddhistic monastic order. 
But we have sufficient reason to fix the latter event as 



8o ANCIENT INDIA. 

having taken place in the latter half of the sixth cen- 
tury before Christ. The religious movements which 
prepared the way for it and created a sort of Bud- 
dhistic atmosphere before the appearance of Buddha, 
must certainly have occupied a length of time which 
is to be measured by centuries. So much is certain 
that great historical changes occurred in India be- 
tween the age of the bards who sang at the Vedic 
altars, and that of the Buddhistic monastic thinkers. 
The tribes who had originally settled as shepherds in 
the northwest corner of the peninsula, and who were 
still close to the gates by which they had shortly be- 
fore entered India, had in the meantime penetrated 
still farther. Having taken possession of a broad do- 
main stretching down the Ganges, the period of mi-> 
gration and of conquest over the obscure aborigines 
is over. Cities have long since risen in the midst of 
the villages in which had lived the herd owners of the 
older time, — some of them were great municipalities, 
seats of all the commotion and activity of splendid 
despotic Oriental courts, where commerce and manu- 
factures are highly developed, where life receives zest 
from a voluptuously refined luxury, and where have be- 
come established sharp social differentiations of rich 
and poor, master and slave. The conditions have 
thus been prepared, where, abandoning gradually the 
careless and aimless existence, for the day as it were, 
of the earlier period, the human mind of the new pe- 
riod now becomes maturer and more thoughtful, may 
begin to weave a connected fabric of reflexions upon 
the import, the end, and the value of human existence. 
Accordingly, in India, very similarly and at almost 
the same time as in Greece, edifices of spiritual thought 
and doctrine arise which soar to a height far above 



BUDDHISM. 8 1 

the ancient structures. And they can, indeed, be de- 
scribed, almost with completeness and in detail, with- 
out feeling the necessity of intermingling any distinc- 
tively Indian or Greek characteristics in the descrip- 
tion ; so much is the type developed by the one people 
like that developed by the other. 

To the devout worshipper of the former age, com- 
muning with his god by means of sacrifice and prayer, 
the knowledge of his god and of the art by which the 
god's favor may be secured, does not appear as some- 
thing self-achieved or self-created, or indeed created 
by any person. Rather, it is an intuition, the presence 
of which is a simple fact, and the possession of which 
by one's self as well as by every other rational being 
is a matter of course. But a change takes place. The 
intellect, as it proceeds in its experience of the toil and 
the pleasure of personal search, learns to know the 
elation of finding, the pride felt in knowledge which 
has been personally achieved and wrested from re- 
ality after many long and painful struggles. A man 
enjoys the final triumph of his vision, the keenness of 
which he has himself trained, and which is able to 
penetrate to the centre of things, differently from the 
masses, common-place beings, who stop at the surface 
of things. Among them he feels himself like one who 
can see among the blind. 

Evidently enough, those possessed of such a vision 
are not sufficiently numerous to compose more than 
small knots of thinkers made up of the serious kind, of 
those whose sentiments are of the more delicate or re- 
fined sort, of those who cultivate their inner life with 
more than ordinary zeal. In the bosom of these 61ite 
bands, embodying their spiritual acquisitions to the 
greatest degree of perfection, there can or must be 



82 ANCIENT INDIA. 

certain particular individuals, dominating personal- 
ities, who, however, can be the leading spirits that 
they are only because they express with the greatest 
energy in their own persons the same life and action 
that animates their companions. 

Thus, in sharp contrast with the great mass of the 
unenlightened, there is developed the type of half- 
heroic, half-philosophic heroes or virtuosi. A concep- 
tion of this sort is hardly conceivable in a time like 
that of the Veda, or of Homer. True, he who had 
distinguished himself as a fine bard, or as an expert 
sacrificer, or as an adept and successful priest and 
sorcerer, may have had his honors in that age, too. But 
he was always nothing more than the type of a genus, ^ 
prominent expert in the use of the tools of the religious 
trade which had representatives everywhere. But the 
men whom we are now looking at are something very 
different. They were, or so appeared to be, persons 
who possessed a distinctive stamp of their own ; they 
were sublime pathfinders, pioneers, not to be com- 
pared with other mortals, steeped in the powers of a 
peculiar mystical completeness and perfection. 

It is a part of the essential character of such men 
that they are conceivable to the creed of their follow- 
ers only in the singular. The name of such a single 
individual is needed as a rally-cry around which the co- 
endeavorers can unite ; and if such a personage never 
actually existed, recourse is had to the dim recesses 
of the mythical past for one of the obscurely grandiose 
names of that misty world, and around it are concen- 
trated their spiritual possessions in which men find 
such great bliss and often consolation. 

Whilst the personal position of the devotee with 
reference to his religious belief is thus undergoing 



BUDDHISM. 83 

modification and becoming a very different one, the 
matter and content of the beHef, too, is at the same 
time assuming a new aspect. 

Those supernatural giants, who were the gods of 
the older age, now cease to govern the world accord- 
ing to human-like caprices. The government is trans- 
ferred to pov/ers of another kind, which, although they 
were well-known ere this, in a primitive form, to the 
intellect, leave the low, contracted sphere of super- 
stition and advance to the heights of thought, which 
afford a wider vision : — forces and substances which 
are put in action by the mechanism of an impersonal 
necessity, their action bemg the kernel of the cosmic 
process itself. 

These forces and substances are, of course, very 
different, indeed, from those which modern learning 
recognises as the recondite fundamental factors of be- 
ing and happening. As the products of an analysis, 
which has still to learn the task of being thorough, 
they are rather the most prominent and first notice- 
able of the light and shadow masses of the universe, 
natural laws and im.pulses which most frequently press 
upon his attention. Thus, the physical elements like 
water and fire, members which exert so much attrac- 
tive force upon the intellect in the youthful period of 
the human mind, the great impulses of love and hatred, 
the fluctuation of happening (becoming) and being 
with its immutable calm. Substances and forces, of 
which the importance varies with place and people, 
but which, taken as a whole, have everywhere the 
same appearance, and therefore belong properly to 
the same category of reflexions upon the world and its 
course. 

The human soul is the special object to which this 



84 ANCIENT INDIA. 

incipient rumination now more and more directs itself. 
To those ages of spiritual childhood, wholly preoccu- 
pied with phenomena, the outer world, follows the pe- 
riod of youth, which gradually becomes introspective, 
with all the earnestness of youth, all its sense of honor, 
its heaving bosom panting with the thirst after bound- 
less ideals. The ego is subjected to investigation to 
see if the secret cannot be found in it for the attain- 
ment of those ideals. There is a growing desire to 
find a clue for the labyrinth of the phenomena of the 
soul. Efforts are made to dissect its parts or forces; 
to comprehend the influences mutually exerted by 
them upon each other; to observe the entrance and 
cessation of the soul's various functions. 

Of foremost importance in these new lines of 
thought is the idea of the migration of the soul. True, 
this idea does not suddenly step forth, full-grown and 
matured, now for the first time. The beginnings of 
the doctrine appear everywhere to be traceable to the 
dawn of religion ; that the soul of the deceased can 
make its dwelling-place, temporarily or permanently, 
in animals, plants, or in other things of every sort, is 
a belief spread over the whole world among peoples 
of low civilisation. 

It was reserved for the subtler refinement of the 
age we are now speaking of, however, to impress with 
the strongest kind of emphasis the additional idea 
upon this doctrine, of its continuation through endless 
stretches of futurity, the horror of eternal futility, in- 
exhaustible endurance. 

The hitherside of life, which had circumscribed 
almost all the hopes and desires of the ancients, now 
appears petty and meaningless, being contrasted with 
the vast spaces beyond ; the terrestrial life becomes a 



BUDDHISM. 85 

mere place of preparation. Whatever of good one 
has performed here below, whatever of sin committed, 
will redound to him over there, perhaps infinitely 
magnified, — as reward or punishment. 

In the literature of an age working on this idea, 
the type of voyages to the nether world and hell, plays 
a prominent part : not the mere tales of story-tellers 
as in the time of the Odyssey, but writings animated 
with the purpose of picturing vividly to the senses the 
awfulness and the inexorability of the punishment to 
be surely expected in the hereafter for even small 
transgressions. Throughout is dominant an austere, 
even anxious solicitude, to preserve the personal ego 
from contamination, even the most trifling, in order 
to secure for it a completeness and perfection which 
will impart confidence and hope to it while upon the 
dark journey of the hereafter. But the chief good, 
which belongs to such a complete perfection, — the 
objective point to which those journeys tend, — is the 
final release from the soul's migration, the exaltation 
of self over all finite rewards and punishments, the 
entrance of the soul into the world of things eternal. 
It is part of the character of the age here portrayed 
— that which we have called the spiritual youth of 
man — that it can recognise as its objective point only 
an absolute one, — one embracing within itself the ab- 
solute perfection. As soon as the intellect grows fond 
of absorbing itself in the antitheses of the transitory 
and the eternal, of happening and being, it is unavoid- 
able that the destiny of everything incomplete, imper- 
fected, should appear to be swept along in the stream 
of the incessant process of becoming and passing 
away. But in the existence of the perfect, all move- 
ment in the sense of change, which necessarily cleaves 



86 ANCIENT INDIA, 

to the concept of the unattained goal or summit, must 
have ended; and the dwelHng-place of the perfect 
must lie in some sphere which spreads over and above 
the inappeasable unrest of the imperfect. 

But who is it that may attain to this highest goal ? 
The answer might be and was given: *'He v/ho had 
been purified by special consecrations, by the observ- 
ance of special mysterious regulations, and even by 
the precepts of sorcery." But in this age, everything 
necessarily led to a new turn of belief. Mention has 
been made of how, in those contracted circles where 
the thoughts just laid down were cultivated, the think- 
er's self-appreciation and seriousness induced a grow- 
ing consciousness of his differentiation from and su- 
periority to those who were without the pale, the 
thoughtless, the blind. That world of eternal things 
is intelligible only to the thinker. And the thinker 
alone, therefore, may participate therein. True, the 
motive, dating from a far remoter time, which was 
allowed to the good man, — even the commonplace 
member of society, so long as he is good, — that of the 
hope of reward in the hereafter, has not lost all of its 
old effectiveness. But it is subordinate to the more 
powerful motive, that the chief and incomparable sal- 
vation in a world, of which but the few have knowl- 
edge, can accrue, not to the poor in spirit, but only 
to those elect few, the thinkers, whose whole life is 
directed to the one pursuit of shaking off terrestrial 
imperfections, and of thus achieving a citizenship in 
the empire of things eternal. 

There is necessarily much of the local color want- 
ing to our portrayel of these views, — much of all the 
concrete reality. For the purpose has been to trace 
the general outline of a particular stage of religious 



BUDDHISM. 87 

evolution common alike to India and Greece. This 
general abstract assumed concrete shape in India in 
Buddhism and its kindred forms ; in Greece in a 
m.ovement first manifest under the cloak of the an- 
cient mysteries, presently struggling again and again 
toward precision and clearness of thought, as the re- 
flective mind strives to tear the veils which obstruct 
its vision, only to fall back as often into the former 
twilight of mysteries again, — all the forms of this 
movement, however, breathing forth the same spirit, 
the wishing one's self out of this transitory world into 
the eternal world.* 

Here, prominently, the mysteries of Orpheus pre- 
sent themselves to notice : that mysterious doctrine 
and cult of sects concentrating about the much-fabled 
name of the bard of Thrace. Dating, as it appears, 
from the sixth century before Christ, and cultivated 
at Athens, and many other places, especially in the 
Greek colonies of Lower Italy, this doctrine and cult 
sought to prepare its devotees, as "The Pure," for 
the future glory by ceremonies of consecration, sacred 
teaching, and the holy orders of the "Orphean Life.*' 
Our knowledge of the peculiar ideas of this cult is 
very limited. But whoever approaches the little which 
has been preserved, with the dogmas and the poetry 
of the Indian mendicant monks in mind, will often be 
surprised, at coming upon what seems a bit of Bud- 
dhism in the midst of Greek civilisation. 

Alongside of the Orphean mysteries, and closely 
related to them, stands the sect of Pythagoreans, es- 
tablished by and named after a man whose powerful, 

*The chief features of this movement have lately been portrayed with as 
much sage penetration, as fine restoration of the sentiment, by E. Rohde, 
Psyche (1893), p. 395 ff. At many points, what here follows is an acceptance o£ 
his views. 



88 ANCIENT INDIA. 

deeply forceful personality shines through the mist of 
a meagre legendary tradition with astonishing clear- 
ness. Whilst the best-known characteristic of the 
Pythagorean speculations is the attempt to discover 
in numbers the most secret and essential kernel of all 
things, yet our attention here is chiefly to be directed 
to the efforts of these closely confederated companions 
to liberate the soul of its imprisonment (for as such 
they looked upon corporeal existence), and from the 
bonds of the soul's migration. 

We cannot attempt here to follow the current of 
these religious-philosophical speculations in the Greece 
of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C, through all its 
various ramifications. It is, however, to be mentioned 
that the influence of the Orphean and Pythagorean 
ideas continues, clearly recognisable, up to the very 
acme of all Greek thought, up to Plato's time. Plato's 
conceptions as to the chief aims of human existence 
stand in closest contact with those of his mystic pred- 
ecessors. True, it is with a strength of which the 
latter fall far short, that his intellect attempts to break 
the shackles of creed and imagination, and to gain the 
conquest of a complete scientific certainty. But quickly 
enough — soonest of all in the problems of the human 
soul and its future destiny — he, too, finds that he has 
gotten to the boundary-lines of those regions, the en- 
trance to which is barred to even the philosopher's 
cognition and proof. 

It is Plato's fashion not to stop for such a reason. 
When the dialectician halts, the poet begins to speak: 
and in pictures of profound beauty, the poesy of Plato 
unrolls its grand views of the hereafter, the subterran- 
ean realm of the shades, and the realm of light and 
eternal ideas. He is accustomed to fortify himself by 



BUDDHISM. 89 

an appeal to what he has heard ^'from men and wo- 
men who are wise in things divine"; what Pindar and 
many other of the poets, '*such of them as are in- 
spired," have uttered; but it is especially the Orphe- 
ans from whose dark wisdom he loves on such occa- 
sions to draw half-mantled and half-revealed matter, 
images from the same realm, intermediate between 
thought and invention, in the twilight of which the 
creations of Buddhism, too, have their being. 

We shall next throw a glance at the chief features 
of both the Indian and the Greek chains of thought, in 
which embodiments of the type just described in the 
history of religion may be recognised. The close re- 
lationship between the two sets of ideas will be con- 
firmed throughout. 



II. 

In both Greece and India, societies of devotees 
were formed. They gave themselves a name which 
served to remind them of their real or supposed 
founder, from Orpheus or Pythagoras, just as the 
'^monk-disciples of the son of the Shakya" did. In 
close communion with each other, and separated from 
the masses without, they strive after a salvation which 
they hope to attain upon the strength of their own 
particular doctrine and their own particular intellec- 
tual and spiritual discipline. 

True, — as one of the more recent historians of these 
Greek developments has already observed, — the seg- 
regation of these sectaries from the world was of a 
much milder character in Greece than in India, cor- 
responding to the differences in the national charac- 
ters. Among the Buddhists the religious idea takes 



go ANCIENT INDIA. 

possession of the whole Hfe of devotees, with unlim- 
ited force and austerity. It destroys their mundane 
existence, with a logical consistency as thoroughly 
merciless as ever any idea has destroyed man's en- 
joyment of temporal life. 

In the sacred legend, the royal scion, who after- 
wards becomes the Buddha, thirsting for the life spi- 
ritual, flees at night from his palace, where, recum- 
bent upon a flower-strewn couch, his young wife lies 
slumbering, a young mother, beside her their first and 
newly born son whom the father has not yet beheld. 

Possibly without any credibility in the ordinary 
historical sense, this legend nevertheless possesses a 
complete intrinsic veracity. The Buddhist, being 
most deeply agitated by his craving for redemption, 
abandons home and wealth, wife and child : they are 
bonds chaining him down to earthly life. He wanders 
from place to place, a homeless beggar. 

In Greece, there is greater moderation. True, the 
communities searching for redemption, in Greece too, 
consider the present world as a place of uncleanness, 
of imprisonment ; but there is no very great serious- 
ness in their efforts to escape from this thraldom. 
Outwardly they continue to observe the duties and 
enjoy the pleasures of every-day life, and are satisfied 
with the practice of securing inwardly a release from 
the limitations of such a life by the secret power of 
the mystic doctrine and the mystic cult. 

Whatever the peculiarities of the different sets of 
ideas evolved by these pious communities, the one 
feature is common to them all : this world appears to 
all of them as a gloomy domain of dissension and suf- 
fering. The symbolism of the Orpheans has it that 
Dionysus, the divinity, is torn to pieces by Titans: 



BUDDHISM. 91 

the blessed unity of all Being undergoes the evil fate 
of disintegration. 

Another Greek conception, of the sixth century B. 
C, discerns in the material existence of things a guilt ; 
all heavens and all worlds, issuing from unity and in- 
finity, having become guilty of wrong, must pay the 
penalty and do penance therefor, resolving themselves 
again into the components from which they original^ 
came into being. 

One noticeable trait is introduced into the appraisal 
of this existence by speculations which are traceable 
first of all to the great obscure Ephesian, Heraclitus. 
''All things are in flux," — all being is a continuous 
change, self-mutation. ''Into the same stream we 
step and yet do not step ; we are and are not." This 
restless flux of becoming and passing away again is 
also characteristic of the human soul, which essenti- 
ally is identical with the least corporeal of the ele- 
ments, fire. As the existence of flame is a. continuing 
death and re-generation, so the soul lives in the cease- 
less production and passing away, in the ceaseless 
ebbing and flowing of its elements. Its apparently 
undisturbed continuity of identity is a deception. 

True, Heraclitus himself, buoyant and active by 
nature, did not tint this doctrine with the gloomy color 
of lamentation that human destiny was therefore all 
aimless and made up of suffering. But to thinkers, 
who were inclined to look upon the continuity and 
constancy of a supreme eternal being as the sole satis- 
factory reply to their inquiries regarding the end of 
human life, this philosophical abstraction concerning 
the nature of material existence was identical with de- 
spair in its utter and hopeless emptiness. Thus, to 
Plato, this is a world of immaterial seeming. Verity 



92 ANCIENT INDIA. 

and complete satisfaction are obtainable aloft only, in 
the flights beyond, where are the eternal ideas ; thither 
the soul, fallen from its bright estate, home-sick, 
yearns ardently to return. 

Now contrast with these Greek thoughts their 
counterparts in India. In the age when the way for 
Buddhism was being prepared, thought moves exactly 
in the same lines as it did with Plato, being a contrast 
of that which is and persists, and that which is transi- 
tory. On the one hand, the soul of the universe, the 
great One, ever untouched by pain ; on the other hand, 
the world of phenomena, the realm of hunger and 
thirst, of care and perplexity, of old age and death. 
And, like Heraclitus, Buddhism too sees in this lat- 
ter world a continuous flux of becoming and passing 
away, a never-ending concatenation of causes and ef- 
fects, — the latter in their turn also becoming causes 
which continue to produce new effects, and so on to 
infinity. Peace there is alone in the world of ''the 
unborn, of that which has not yet come into being, 
has not yet been made, has not yet assumed form," 
in the realm of the Nirvana. 

An early Buddhistic dialogue compares life to a 
tree, the root of which is perishable and mutable, as 
are also its trunk, and branches, and leaves : who can 
believe that the shadow of such a tree will always re- 
main the same and escape the fate of change ? ''But 
the unstable — is it suffering or joy?" asks Buddha of 
his disciples. And they answer : " Suffering, master ! " 
Or, in the words of a stanza, oft repeated : 

"All shape assumed inconstant is, unstable, 
All subject to the fate of birth and death. 
It comes to pass, and soon it vanishes. 
Blessed rest, when th' space of birth and death is done I " 



BUDDHISM, 93 

Moreover, we find here exactly the same applica- 
tion of the aforementioned fundamental philosophical 
views that we do in Heraclitus. In both cases they 
are applied to the soul and its life. ''Disciples!" 
says Buddha, ''That which is called soul, or spirit, or 
reason, is ever changing and becoming something else, 
— ^ceaselessly, day and night, constantly going through 
the process of becoming and of ceasing to be." 

A dialogue of a later time, very remarkable in a 
historical regard, reproducing throughout the early 
Buddhistic views, treats of these thoughts in greater 
detail. It is the conversation of a holy man with King 
Milinda (the Greek Prince Menander, well-known from 
coins), who, it seems likely, ruled over the Northwest 
of India about lOO B. C. Strongly reminding one of 
Heraclitus, it compares life, personality, to a flame. 
"When, O great King, a man lights a candle, will not 
the candle burn through the night ? " — " Yes, sire ! it 
will burn through the night." — "How, then? O great 
King ! Is the flame during the first watch of the night 
the same that it is in the second watch ? " — "No, sire! 
. . . but the light burned the whole night, adhering to 
the same matter." — " So, also, O great King, the chain 
of the elements of things is joined together. One ele- 
ment is always coming into being, another is always 
ceasing and passing away. Without beginning, with- 
out end, the chain continues to be joined together.'^ 

The identity of the Greek and Indian ideas con- 
cerning the nature and destinies of the human soul ex- 
tends still further. What are the effects upon those 
ideas of this all-dominant, pain-bringing law which 
subjects everything to the fate of coming into being 
only to pass away again ? Both the Greek thinkers 
and the Buddhists alike answer this question by postu- 



94 ANCIENT INDIA. 

lating the doctrine of the migration of the soul. Death 
is followed by a new birth — not necessarily in human 
form, both the divine and the animal are deemed pos- 
sible; this re-birth is followed again by death, and this 
by re-birth : so that the one life is merely an infinites- 
imal link in a vast chain of lives, to be bound up in 
which is a great misfortune. 

The Orpheans symbolise the migration of the soul 
by means of a circle or wheel. They speak of the 
wheel of fate and of birth ; the final end of existence 
seems to them to be 

"To release one's self from the circle and breathe anew, freed from dis- 
tress." 

In the inscription of a small gold plate taken from' 
a tomb near the ancient Sybaris, the soul of the buried 
person, an Orphean, for whom the claim of final re- 
lease from the migration of the soul is made, exclaims : 

"At last I have flown from the circle of ill, the toil-laden ring." 

Imagine the rhythm of these hexameters turned 
into the irregular movement of the Indian Sloka-in^XxQ, 
and one might imagine himself in the very midst of 
the Buddhistic poetry. A Buddhist proverb says : 

" Dong to the watcher is the night, 
To the weary wand'rer long the road, 
To him, who will not see truth's light. 
Long is the torment of his chain of births." 

And another expression, which is put into the 
mouth of Buddha, at the point when — his trials and 
struggles over — he has achieved the knowledge of sal- 
vation. He is triumphing in the fact that he has pen- 
etrated the designs of the wicked foe, those evil powers 
ruling terrestrial things, who unremittingly are ever re- 



BUDDHISM. 



95 



constructing the corporeal house, the body, and whom 
he has succeeded in putting away from himself : 

" In vain the endless road 
Of rebirth I have wandered, 
In vain have sought life's builder, 
An ill is this fate of birth. 

House-builder 1 found you arel 
You'll build no more the house. 
Your timbers are all broken, 
Destroyed the house's spires. 
The heart — escaped from earth — 
Has compassed the aim of its search." 

And in the same way that the Orpheans symbolise 
the continuous existence of the migrating soul by 
means of a circle or wheel, so too the Buddhists speak 
of the ** wheel o^ lives." Buddhistic pictures usually 
portray this wheel of existence in such manner that a 
stage of existence is symbolically shown between every 
pair of spokes, as the human kingdom, the animal 
kingdom, heaven, hell \ beside the wheel is the form 
of Buddha, who, as one redeemed, stands without the 
revolution of existences. 

In the dialogue above cited, King Milinda asks the 
holy man for a parable which shall give a notion of 
the interminable, beginningless migration of the soul. 
Thereupon the holy man draws a circle on the ground 
and asks: *'Has this circle any end, great King?" — 
<'Ithasnot, sire!" — That is the same as the circle 
made by the course of births," the holy man teaches 
him. **Is there then any end to its succession ? " — 
*' There is not, sire !" 

And as the Orphean doctrine had it that he who 
was redeemed '* had flown from the circle," so an early 
Buddhistic proverb says : 



96 ANCIENT INDIA. 

"The swan soars through the sun's ethereal pathways; 
The sorcerer flies through all the realms of space: 
So, sages, rich in v/isdom, flee this world, 
The prince of death and all his powers o'erwhelming," 

One brief glance more at a few of the particular 
traits of the doctrine of the migration of the soul, 
common to both India and Greece. It will be plainly- 
seen that the fundamental similitude of ideas has had 
the effect of making the aspect of even the minuter 
details in the two religions similar. 

One characteristic, very prominent among both 
peoples, is the very natural connexion of the doctrine 
of the soul's migration with the idea of moral retribu- 
tion. The good and the evil which man has wrought 
in this life will in turn be done to him in another life, " 
meted out to him in the blessedness of heavenly, or in 
the pain of infernal, worlds. 

Naturally, at this point, the popular imagination— 
widely removed from the colorless abstractions of re- 
flective thought — begins to play a part. Poetry drew 
all kinds of pictures of the horrors of the infernal 
world. There was a '^voyage to the lower world" in 
poetry among the Orpheans, and another of the same 
name among the Pythagoreans ; the Buddhistic litera- 
ture is fairty overrun with innumerable, moral-pointing 
descriptions of -the descents of holy men into the in- 
fernal regions and of the horrors there observed by 
them.* 

Opposed to these terrors are the heavenly ecstasies. 
x\nd here a characteristic appears which is emphasised 
strongly by the Buddhists, but visible only sporad- 
ically in Greece, although entirely the same there.' 

* We may refer here to the fine description which L. Scherman {Materials 
for a Historji of the hidian Literature of Visions, 1892) has given of these phau= 
tasjfis. 



BUDDHISM. 97 

Empedocles denies immortality to the gods ; their 
longevity is great, but they are not eternal. The di- 
vinities of the Veda have in the same way ceased to 
be immortal to the Buddhists. Possessed of a length 
of life reaching beyond the grasp of all human stand- 
ards of measurement, they are, nevertheless, along 
with others, knit into the chain of the migration of 
souls ; and the human being who has lived a blame- 
less life, dare hope to be born again as a god. No 
more lively illustration can be found in all the history 
of religion than this fate of the ancient gods, how an 
idea — having lost its original import, its own proper 
life — yet maintains its existence into a later age and 
is then by the latter animated with a new import, cor- 
responding to the altered views of things. 

As still another common Indo-Grecian character- 
istic of the doctrine of the migration of the soul may 
be mentioned, that, among both peoples, there were 
certain especially inspired men, who could, so it was 
held of them, recall the various earlier em/oodiments 
which they themselves and others had passed through. 
Pythagoras, of whom, it was sung that 

" When he with might compelled to the fullest the powers of mind, 
Easily could he th'adventures o'erscan of every existence. 
Through ten, yea, through the vista of twenty past, long human life-spans," 

is said to have related experiences and adventures 
from his earlier lives. Empedocles said : 

" Thus have I been in former existence a youth, and a maiden, 
SO; too, a shrub, and an eagle, a poor mute fish in the ocean." 

Exactly so, only exaggerating the marvellous into 
the boundlessly wonderful, the Buddhistic religion tells 
how in that holy night in which he first beholds the 
true knowledge of salvation, as in a vision, the whole 



98 ANCIENT INDIA. 

picture of his previous forms of existence, through 
hundreds of thousands of births, passes in review be- 
fore the soul of Buddha. Tales, recording adventures 
of the most variegated colors from these past exist- 
ences of Buddha himself, of his disciples and enemies, 
accompanied with lessons and applications of every 
sort, are among the most cherished elements of popu- 
lar Buddhistic literature. Hundreds of re-births are 
recounted of Buddha, now as a king, again as a devout 
hermit, or as a courtier, or as a god, or as a lion, an 
ape, a fish. And it is well known how inestimable is 
the value of these stories and fables to the folk-lore 
studies of our own time — seeing that the motive of 
them frequently reappears, scattered over the whole 
earth. 

III. 

Opposed to the realm of the migration of the soul 
with all its sufferings, there is, for Greek and Indian 
thinkers alike, a world of freedom, of the complete 
cessation of all suffering. Whilst the youthful human 
mind of the early ages perceived in power and victory, 
in wealth and long life, the chief joys of life, the su- 
preme end of life is now salvation from the misery of 
becoming and passing away, rest in the calm glory of 
eternity. 

Among the Greeks, as we have seen, the Orpheans 
speak of '^ releasing one's self from the circle," and of 
''taking flight from the circle." Plato pictures the 
soul, as being rescued from its wanderings and enter- 
ing into ''the community of the divine, the pure, the 
true to itself. " At one time, it is the negative forrri 
which this ideal assumes : the release from the suffer- 
ing of existence. At another, it is the positive form : 



BUDDHISM. 



99 



perfect, unchanging blessedness. A certain reserve 
was for the most part observed toward the temptation 
to make the description of this condition of perfection 
too concrete and to paint it in high colors : these most 
beautiful homes of the soul are not easily described, 
says Plato. 

Now this all very closely touches upon Buddhistic 
ideas. Buddha says to his followers: '*As the great 
ocean, my disciples, is permeated with a single flavor, 
the flavor of the salt ; so, too, disciples, is this doc- 
trine and this law permeated with a single flavor, the 
flavor of salvation." 

** There is, my disciples, a place where there is 
neither earth nor water, neither light nor air, neither 
this world nor that world, neither sun nor moon. I 
call that, disciples, neither coming nor going nor rest- 
ing, neither death nor birth. It is without substruc- 
ture, without progress, without stop. It is the end of 
suffering." 

Sometimes the various turns taken by the Bud- 
dhistic texts in which this final aim. Nirvana, is spoken 
of, run as if this aim were the termination of all being, 
or absolute nothing ; then again they seem to point to 
a state of highest perfection, surpassing all compre- 
hension and baffling all description. Taken as a whole, 
the coloring of these thoughts is perceptibly a more 
negative one than in Greece ; and the solution of all 
too far-reaching questions is declined with greater 
firmness and readiness. ''He who has gained salva- 
tion," thus runs a Buddhistic quotation, ''surpasses 
the point where his being can be compassed by the 
numbers of the corporeal world. He is deep, immeas- 
urable, unfathomable, like the ocean." And at an- 
other time, Buddha says to a disciple, who will not 



loo ANCIENT INDIA. 

suffer a quietus to be imposed upon his questions about 
the existence of him who has won salvation : '* What 
is not revealed by me, suffer it to remain unrevealed." 

As to the ideas concerning the way by which the 
final highest aim was to be attained — in Greece they 
rapidly developed in matter and profundity. Early 
thought still remained essentially under the influence 
of religious creations which carry the style of remotest 
antiquity. We know what is the customary practice 
in the cult of uncivilised peoples, for one who seeks 
to acquire supernatural power or to ward off evil spirits 
or death-bringing things of witchcraft. He fasts ; he 
withdraws into solitude ; he avoids everything that has 
any relation with death or similar perils, as food which 
for some reason or other is considered to be connected 
with the kingdom of death ; by various means he ex- 
cites within himself ecstatic conditions. This technique 
of the primitive sorcerer's art, applied to new pur- 
poses, maintained itself in Greece as elsewhere with 
indomitable pertinacity. 

It has been justly observed, that a figure like that 
of Epimenides — an adept master of mystical wisdom, 
flourishing about 600 B. C, and celebrated throughout 
all Greece, — bears a number of traits which character- 
ise perfectly the type of the savage medicine-man : 
fasts and solitude, mystic intercourse with the spirits, 
long ecstacies, in which he gains his *' enthusiastic 
wisdom." The interdiction of food and — if this ethno- 
logical expression be permissible — the observance of 
taboos of various kinds, among which is very promi- 
nent the aversion to all things which in any way re- 
mind one of the domain of death, — these are a special 
vehicle for the spiritual endeavors both of the Orpheans 
and of the Pythagoreans. 



BUDDHISM. loi 

But a new tendency is soon introduced and gains 
more and more in strength. True continence and 
purity, so Plato teaches, lie in the purification of the 
soul from all sensual things, liberation from the pas- 
sions and desires which '< transfix the soul to the body 
as with a nail" and which compel the soul to endure 
being reborn in ever new forms of embodiment. The 
redeemer from these bonds is philosophy, which alone 
really prepares one for death. Philosophy guides us 
from the world of constant becoming into that of ac- 
tual being, into the realm of eternal ideas. The blessed 
moment of a vision dawns : the curtain before the 
thinker's eyes sunders, and truth herself shines upon 
him, in the glory of which immersing itself, the soul 
is released from the transitory world. In the joy, the 
bliss of this contemplation, the philosopher, even here 
below, deems himself in the islands of the blessed. 
Death, however, forever releases the soul of him, who 
'*has purified himself through philosophy, from cor- 
poreality": his ?>o\x\ enters into ''that akin to his soul, 
the invisible, the divine, the immortal, the truly wise." 

In this last thought, the chain of ideas, which we 
are now considering, found its culmination. And up 
to this very point, the Indian ideas follow the Greek 
ideas in undeviatingly parallel lines. 

In India, too, in Buddha's age, the aims of the new 
spiritual yearning were striven for with the same means 
from the old cult of sorcery, that we find in Greece — 
retirement into solitude, exhaustion by severe fastings, 
and the development of a whole category of ecstatic 
conditions. For its part. Buddhism rejects fasting as 
well as every kind of self-torture ; but it lays great 
stress upon the cultivation of those ecstatic medita- 
tions, in the exalted calm and quiet of which, afar 



I02 ANCIENT INDIA. 

from the confusing superabundance of form of the 
material world, it was thought, a presentiment or fore- 
taste might be enjoyed of the final termination of all 
transitoriness. One of the old Buddhist monkish 
poets sings : 

" When the thundercloud its drum awakes, 
Fast the rain sweeps o'er the bird's swift paths, 
And in quiet mountain cave the monk 
Fosters revery : no joy like that 1 

"When, along the flowery bank of streams, 
Which the forest's motley garland crowns. 
He fosters revery, wrapped in blissful calm, 
No joy ever can he find like that I " 

But that which, before all other things, gives re- 
lease from earthly suffering is the complete subjection 
of desire, of *^that thirst which but leads from one re- 
birth to another re-birth," — the attainment of the pure 
and highest knowledge. 

*'Who conquers it — that despicable thirst, which 
it is difficult to escape in this world — ^from him all suf- 
fering drops like drops of water from the lotus flower." 

But this thirst which accompanies earthly exist- 
ence may be subdued through knowledge, — that knowl- 
edge which discovers the misery of the fate of be- 
coming, merely to pass away again, and reveals the 
cessation thereof in the escape from this world. Since 
the value or worthlessness of life depends upon the 
fateful play of great cosmic powers, the endeavor of 
the devout, the sage, is directed no longer to the ob- 
ject of securing the goods of this world through the 
friendship of benevolent gods, but to the aim of pen- 
etrating the infinite cosmic process, in order that, 
having mastered it, he may prepare for himself the 
future place where it is good to be. This last propo- 



BUDDHISM. 103 

sitlon is alike characteristic of the religion of India 
and of Greece. 

Like the ideas of Plato, the doctrine of the Bud- 
dhists is that the seeker gains possession of the knowl- 
edge of salvation, — after a ceaseless struggle and en- 
deavor continuing through a period of innumerable 
re-births, — in the sudden inspiration of one incompar- 
able instant of time. He to whom this instant has 
come has *^ obtained salvation and beheld it face to 
face." The Buddhist enlightened one, like the phi- 
losopher of Plato, continues to live on earth as a com- 
pleted being who, in his most fundamental nature, is 
now no longer an earthly citizen. ''The monk who 
has put away from him lust and desire, and is rich in 
wisdom, he has even here on earth obtained salvation 
from death, rest, Nirvana, the eternal home." And 
when the end of earthly existence has come, he disap- 
pears into those mysterious depths, concerning which 
Buddha forbade his disciples to inquire whether their 
meaning is ideal being or absolute nothing. 

* * 

The naturalist, studying a cellular structure, will 

obtain very different views of the same object, accord- 
ing to the direction in which he makes his sections. 
The direction in which we have contemplated Bud- 
dhism made it possible for us to notice the very clos- 
est relationship between its fundamental principles 
and the doctrines of the Orpheans, the Pythagoreans, 
and Plato. But in conclusion, we must not omit 
briefly to point out that other lines of consideration 
would have produced other views and other compari- 
sons of a very different nature. 

If we scan the personality of the great Indian pro- 
mulgator of these ideas, we find at once that Buddha 



104 ANCIENT INDIA. 

is in all the phenomena of his life, in the manner of 
his teachings and labors, as widely different from the 
Greek thinkers as the Oriental character is from the 
Hellenic. A nimbus of miracles surrounding and 
glorifying his life, a lofty dignity which overtops all 
the universe, caps his image in a way impossible to 
imagine in connexion with the earthly and human fig- 
ures of Pythagoras and Plato. It is no longer the 
regions of Greek philosophy, but rather the regions 
of the Gospels, into which the Buddhistic tradition 
now seems to conduct us. In fact, some have gone 
so far — though in my opinion without sufficient reason 
— as to draw from the striking resemblances of these 
two fields the conclusion that direct transfers have 
been made from India to the West. As it was for- 
merly supposed that Pythagoras had drawn his doc- 
trines from Indian sources closely related to Bud- 
dhism, so, too, the assumption has found believers — - 
corresponding to the various views taken of Buddhism 
— that Buddhistic prototypes underlie extensive por- 
tions of the Gospels, and that either at Alexandria or 
at Antioch the intercourse of Christian writers with 
Buddhistic envoys led to the introduction of a large 
number of stories, proverbs and parables from Indian 
literature into that of the New Testament. 

It would be possible to carry this identification 
still further. If along with the person of Buddha and 
with his doctrine we glance at the third member 
of the ancient Buddhistic trinity — the ecclesiastical 
brotherhood or church — we shall be reminded, with 
sufficient vividness, by the immemorially ancient rules, 
of the Buddhistic order of mendicant monks, — with 
its deep-rooted aversion to the world, the austerity of 
its precepts as to poverty and chastity, with its long 



BUDDHISM. 105 

list of instructions concerning the observance of dignity 
and reserve, which are manifested after a set fashion 
in mien and glance, in the manner of eating and drink- 
ing, in short, in every gesture, — of Christian monasti- 
cism, whether viewed as a whole or in its minutest 
details. 

I think that we may and must be satisfied with the 
similarity of historical causes at work in the two sep- 
arate quarters of the world as the explanation for all 
these resemblances, — a similarity which in my judg- 
ment amply accounts for our meeting among civilisa- 
tions nearer to us in time and place with formations, 
isolated and scattered, yet closely resembling those 
which at the height of Indian history, pulsating with 
Indian life-blood, were united, in Buddhism, into so 
compact and remarkable a whole. 



INDEX. 



Agni, 19, 44, 'JJ. 

Ahana, 48. 

Alexander of Epirus, 40. 

Alexander the Great, 39, 

Amelung, 12 footnote. 

Animals, deified in early religions, 

62 et seq. 
Animism, 60 et seq. 
Anthropomorphism, 6s et seq. 
Antiochus, 40. 
Arya, 18. 
Asceticism, 90. 
Asiatic Society, i et seq., 5. 
Asoka, 39, 40. 
Asvin, 55, 67. 
Athene, 48. 
Aurora, 20 footnote. 

Babylon, influence of, on the religion 
of India, 72. 

Benfey, 7 footnote, 15. 

Bimbisara, 39. 

Birth and rebirth, 93. 

Blessedness, state of, 99, 

Bohtlingk, 28. 

Books, committed to memory in an- 
cient India, 22 et seq. 

Bopp, 10, 13, 27. 

Brahma, 18. 

Brahmans, 4-6. 

Buddha, 7, 90, 92-94, 98, 99, 103, 104; 
date of his advent, 38 et seq., 79-80; 
religion of, 43. 

Buddhism, literature and customs 
of, 12, 22; Greek religious thought 
compared with, 78 etseq.,92etseq., 
date of its rise, 79-80; resemblances 
between Christianity and, 104. 



Burgman, 12 footnote. 
Burnouf, 12, 28. 

Candle, simile of, 93. 

Caste, priestly, 74. 

Castes in early India, 18-19. 

Caunaka, 25-26. 

Causes, historical, similarity of, suf- 
ficient to account for the resem- 
blances of diflEerent religions, 105. 

Chronology of early India, 37 et seq. 

Coincidences in the religious thought 
of various nations, 79. 

Colebrooke, 8. 

Comparative, grammar, 10, 27 ; myth- 
ology, 45, 51 ; philology, 45. 

Daughter, 46. 

Dawn, 19, 50. 

Deborah, song of, 69 footnote. 

Demons, good and bad, 65. 

Devas, 64. 

Devotees, societies of, 89. 

Dionysus, 90. 

Dioskuroi, 55, 67. 

Dushjanta, 6. 

East India Company, policy of, 4. 

Ecstasy, 100, loi. 

Edda, 46, 55. 

Ego, 84. 

Egypt, 62. 

Elements, natural, personification of 

in early religions, 62 et seq, 
Empedocles, 97. 
English in India, 2, 4 et seq. 
Enlightenment, Buddhistic, 103. 
Epic, the Indian, 31. 



io8 



ANCIENT INDIA. 



Epimenides, loo. 

Erinys, 47, 49. 

Ethical stage of the evolution of re- 
ligion, 70 et seq. 

Ethnology, its influence on Vedic re- 
search, 51, 56 et seq. 

Evolution of divinities, 65. 

Fasting, 100, loi. 
Fetishes, 65. 
Fever {tapas), 76. 
Futurity, 84-85. 

Ganges, 18. 

Germany, her share in Sanskrit re- 
search, I, 9, 26. 

Gospels, compared with Buddhism, 
104. 

Grammar, Sanskrit, its subtlety and 
complexity, 5-6, 24-26. 

Grammatical systems, their evolu- 
tion, 54. 

Greece, Buddhistic parallels in, 87 
et seq., 93 et seq. 

Greek mystics, go et seq. 

Greek mythology, 55. 

Greeks, contact of with the Hindus, 
39- 

Grimm Brothers, 28, 32. 

Hastings, Warren, 4. 

Haupt, 27. 

Hearing, rich in, synonym of "well 

read," 23. 
Heaven, 85-86, 96. 
Helen of Troy, 48-53. 
Hell, 85, 

Heraclitus, 91, 92, 93-, 
Hermann, Gottfried, 27. 
Hermes, 47, footnote, 55. 
History of early India, 18-19. 
Homer, 10, 14, 58, 82. 
Hymns of the Rig- Veda, 18-26. 

Ideas, Plato's, 88, 92. 

Identity of historical causes, suffi- 
cient to account for the resem- 
blances of different religions, 105. 

India, history of early, 35 et seq. 

India Office Library, 8. 

Indian civilisation, rise of, 80. 



Indian philosophy, rise of, 80. 
Indo-Germanic languages, 10. 
Indra, 19, 33, 44, 55, 66, 69 footnote; 

70, 77- 
Indus, 18. 

Intellect in religion, 83. 
Iranian divinity, 72, 73. 
Italic language, 10. 

Jehovah, 69 footnote. 
Jones, Sir William, 2-7. 

Kalidasa, 6, 14. 

Knowledge, of salvation, 103. 

Kuhn, Adalbert, 15, 49. 

Lachman, Karl, 27. 

Lang, 56. 

Lassen, Christian, 13. 

Laws of India, 4 etseq. 

Lessing, 27. 

Lexicography of the Veda, 29. 

Lycurgus, 6. 

Mahabharata, 12, 13. 

Mannhardt, W., 56. 

Manu, laws of, 6, 13, 44, 46. 

Manuscripts of the Veda, 14. 

Medicine-man, 100. 

Memorising of books, 23. 

Meander, 93. 

Mexico, 62. 

Migration of the soul, 84, 94, 96-98, 
99-103 et seq. 

Migrations of the early Indians, 18- 
19. 

Milinda, King, 93, 95. 

Monasticism, Christian and Bud- 
dhistic, 104-105. 

Monotheism, 68 et seq. 

Mother-tongue, 11, 

Miiller, Max, 5 footnote, 15, 28, 46, 50. 

Mystical wisdom, 100. 

Mystics, Greek, go et seq. 

Mythological history, 54. 

Mythology, and religion of early In- 
dia, 33, 44 ; Greek and Latin, 46. 

Myths, interpreted as meteorological 
phenomena, 50 et seq.; of savage 
races, 56 et se(^, 



INDEX. 



109 



Natural powers deified, 66-67. 
Nether world, 85. 

Nirvana, abstractly described, 85-86; 
92, 99, 103. 

Odyssey, The, 85. 

Olympian gods, 50. 

Ormuzd, 72. 

Orpheans, 94-96. 

Orpheus, mysteries of, 87-89, 98. 

Paii, 12. 

Parallelism of Buddhistic and Greek 
religious thought, 78 et seq., 103. 

Parjanya, 21. 

Paulinus k St. Bartholomaeo, 5 foot- 
note. 

Perkunas, 21 footnote. 

Philology, 27. 

Pindar, 89. 

Plato, ethics, philosophy, and poetry 
of, 91, 92, 98, loi, 103, 104. 

Poetry of early India, 19. 

Polytheism, 68-69. 

Pons, Father, 7 footnote. 

Pramantha, 49, 52, 53. 

Prayer, 64 et seq. 

Prehistoric cults, 57 et seq. 

Priests, early Indian, 18-19. 

Prinseps, 12. 

Prometheus, 49, 52, 53. 

Punishment, 85. 

Purification of the soul, Plato's, 

lOI. 

Pushan, 55. 
Pythagoreans, 87-89, 96, 98. 

Release from auttering, 94, 98 et seq. 

Religion, primitive, 58 et seq., 60 et 
seq.; intellect in, 83. 

Religions of savage races, 56 et seq. 

Religious, ceremonies, 75 ; heroes, 
81, 82; thought, development of, 
43; thought, resemblances of in 
various nations, 79 ; rewards, 85. 

Resignation, 90. 

Retribution, moral, 96. 

Rig-Veda, 18, 28, 31 et seq., 44. 

Rohde, E., 87 footnote. 

Roman and Greek history compared 
with early Indian, 36. 



Roth, 15, 28. 
Ruckert, F., 9. 

Sacrifices, cult of, 64 et seq.; early 
Indian, 19-20; Vedic, 73-76- 

Sage, religious, 102. 

Sakuntala, 6. 

Salvation, 85-86, 99. 

Sanskrit, study of, its origin, i et 
seq. ; supposed identity of, with 
other languages, 7; its primitive- 
ness, 11; St. Petersburg Diction- 
ary of, 28; roots of, 46, 52. 

Sarama, 47-48, 52. 

Saramejas, 48. 

Saranjus, 47. 

Sayana, 28. 

Schermann, L., 96 footnote. 

Schlegel, 9. 

Schmidt, John, 12 footnote. 

Self, 85. 

Seven, 47 footnote. 

Soma, 33, 75. 

Sorcery, 63 et seq., 75-76, 100. 

Soul, the human, 83-85. 

Spirits, 60 et seq. 

Stone age of religion, 65. 

Suffering, 90, 92. 

Suffering, cessation of, 99. 

Sun-myth, 48, 56. 

Survivals, religious, 57 et seq. 

Sybaris, 94. 

Taboos, 100. 

Tacitus, 18, 31. 

Tapas, 76. 

Teutonic mythology, 55. 

Texts of the Veda, 17. 

Theogony of early India, 44, 50. 

Thirst for existence, 93. 

Thor, 55. 

Time-standards of the Veda, 38. 

Trinity, Buddhistic, 95. 

Troubadours, the, 14. 

Troy, siege of, 48. 

Tschandragupta, 39. 

Tylor, 56. 

Ushas, 20, 45. 

Varuna, 44, 67, 71, 72, 77' 
Vayu, 33- 



ANCIENT INDIA. 



Veda, the study of, 2 ; history of its 
acquisition, 14 et seq.; when com- 
posed, 17 ; its form and import, 17- 
24; its exegesis, 28 et seq.; litera- 
ture and religion of, 43 ; Old Testa- 
ment compared with, 69 footnote. 

Vedic divinities, character of, 70 et 
seq., 77; not primordial, 59, 97. 

Vowels, their transformations in the 
Indo-Germanic languages, 11 foot- 
note. 

Vritra, 33. 



Weber, 15, 29. 

Wheel, Orphean and Buddhistic, 94, 

95- 
Wilson's Sanskrit Dictionary, 30. 
Woden, 33 footnote. 
Writing, Vedas not transmitted in. 

22-26. 



Zimmer, 31 footnote. 
Zoroaster, 15. 



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